texas — Page 2

→ May 4, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Columbia Spectator, with the help of New York magazine, has a detailed look at the protests, the encampments, the police overreach, and more on campus, through hundreds of interviews with students and faculty across the religious and ideological divides.

In the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes of how colleges positioned themselves as activist havens when speaking to prospective students, only to find that those students believed them.

The LA Times has the story of a man who engineered the theft of millions of gallons of water from California’s limited resources, while enriching himself and his friends and lying on his income taxes.

ProPublica reports on the EPA’s decision to ignore its own scientists and approve a plastic fuel additive that is nearly guaranteed to cause cancer in anyone exposed to it regularly over a lifetime. Well, a shortened lifetime, I guess.

The Washington Post ran a long piece on the effects of sea level rise on the coastal U.S., much of it in states whose elected officials have denied climate change and fought efforts to mitigate it.

A research study by the Australian government’s Institute of Criminology examined how anti-COVID protests brought together numerous anti-government forces, including those beholden to conspiracy theories and extremist anti-authority sentiments (like so-called “sovereign citizens”).

Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”

Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, after which Haaretz called for his firing.

Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.

The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote that college presidents who rush to call in the police haven’t learned a damn thing since the 1960s. Today is the anniversary of the police murdering four students at Kent State who were protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, by the way.

Credit goes to the Philadelphia police, however, who declined Penn’s request that they come clear out student protesters unless the school could provide evidence of imminent danger.

CNN’s Dana Bash went on air and parroted a bunch of pro-Israel talking points while comparing pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazi forces.

Ken Klippenstein resigned from The Intercept and revealed some of how management there sought to spike stories critical of Jeff Bezos and other rich, powerful targets, all while apparently paying themselves more while laying off editors and journalists. I’ve linked to quite a bit of Ken’s work here and will probably sign up for his newsletter now that he’s going solo.

Andrew Huberman’s podcast is one of the most popular in America. It’s also rife with false information.

Florida has removed over 22,000 children from its version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) this year, defying a federal law designed to protect them. I never though the wolves would eat my face!

Meanwhile, Florida’s farmers are suffering from a lack of labor thanks to the state’s draconian law attacking businesses that used undocumented workers, as are construction businesses, restaurants, and hoteliers, all major industries in the state.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) shared a video of white University of Mississippi students making monkey noises and shouting racist chants at a Black protester, saying “Ole Miss taking care of business” (while using the racist-derived nickname for the school). Collins has previously shared posts from neo-Nazis and suggested murdering migrants, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Chicago won’t discipline nine city police officers who were (are?) members of the right-wing extremist Oath Keepers group, after the mayor and CPD superintendent had promised to do so.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that North Carolina and West Virginia can’t deny gender-affirming medical coverage to transgender people. North Carolina sought to specifically deny it to state employees and their dependents, while West Virginia sought to do so for people enrolled in Medicaid.

Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.

A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.

The Guardian looks at how many bands make little to no money, even taking losses, from touring. With record sales in the toilet and tours unprofitable, what career is there in making music if you’re not a superstar?

I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.

Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

ProPublica reports on a new effort at the IRS to identify illegal tax avoidance schemes by sports-team owners. It would appear these owners are happy to take taxpayer money, but not to pay back in the legally required portion of their profits.

Paris claimed it was going to use the Olympics as a spur to revitalize one of its poorest districts, Seine-Saint-Denis; instead it appears they’ve evicted impoverished residents and decreased the region’s air quality. The district was the site of the 2005 riots against the police that inspired the Oscar-nominated 2019 film Les Misérables.

Antiabortion zealots are trying to force the Amarillo, Texas, city council to pass a ridiculous, unenforceable ordinance forbidding the use of city streets for the purpose of leaving the state for an abortion. Find someone who loves you as much as these people love depriving other people of their rights.

Utah passed a transphobic bathroom law, and in the first week in which the site to report alleged violations was live, they received almost 4000 bogus reports and left a bunch of information unprotected for anyone to access.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, colleges, environment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, misinformation, mississippi, Music, olympics, paris, police, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, trans rights, utah, water crisis

→ April 28, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/24.

Nothing this week from me at the Athletic, but I need to write up a couple of minor-league games I’ve been to so there will be something in the next few days.

I reviewed the board game Ancient Knowledge over at Paste; it’s pretty clever, but I found the title and theme didn’t connect to the game play at all.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET on Diamond Dreams and on their new collectibles show at 2:30 for one segment, all to talk about prospects. You can watch via the app or if you subscribe to Roku, Youtube, or some other sites; I have figured out that the shows re-air all week, but you can’t just watch an archived version.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday, talking about … death. Wait, that’s only the cat.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica explores how a lack of funding and organization at a VA clinic in Chico, California, led to two preventable shootings, including one where a veteran shot and killed her own mother. If you want to support our troops, instead of just standing and clapping at a ballgame, vote for candidates who’ll fully fund the VA and its indispensable resources for our veterans.

Climate change is driving us towards a “coffee apocalypse” as the growing regions for the plant shrink and the plant itself tries to migrate to higher altitudes.

A tech bro wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco, in his own words. Balaji Srinivasan has worked at Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and the genetic testing firm Counsyl (which he co-founded). He sounds insane.

A prosecutor in Texas has asked the courts to clear the conviction of a woman he helped put on death row. Melissa Lucio’s two-year-old daughter died after falling down a flight of stairs, but she was convicted of capital murder and spent 16 years behind bars.

The LA Times’s Michael Hiltzik excoriates the cash grab in Nevada, where state legislators are trying to hand hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to the Oakland A’s’ billionaire owner in a climate of increasing voter resistance.

Another relief agency has accused Israel of targeting its vehicles: the International Development and Relief Foundation says that the IDF deliberately bombed its trucks delivering water to Gazans.

Columbia barred a student protester who said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” from its campus. Khymani James was active in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. This seems like a pretty simple case of someone crossing the line and the university responding appropriately – in contrast to the preponderance of stories about protests on campuses across the country.

A Jewish student at Columbia wrote on Mehdi Hasan’s new site Zeteo that the news coverage of antisemitism on campuses is inaccurate and distracts from actual threats, like outside groups that dox Jewish students.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch wrote in praise of the student journalists covering the protests and the university responses at Columbia and beyond.
Will the “cancel culture” pundits say anything about USC’s decision to cancel its Muslim-American valedictorian’s commencement speech? Don’t hold your breath, writes Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian.

Transphobes have latched on to the dubious “Cass Report” as further evidence of … I don’t even know, it’s all just bigotry and trans panic, but the interesting bit here is that Dr. Hilary Cass herself is already distancing herself from the report’s conclusions, saying HRT and puberty blockers should be made available to trans teens. The same newsletter reports on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) saying that he wants to “end” trans and gender non-conforming teachers in the state.

Tennessee Republicans passed a law arming teachers over loud opposition from parents and students. How long until the first “friendly fire” death in a Tennessee school?

However, the state GOP’s attempt to ram through a school voucher bill and strip funding from the state’s already poor public schools failed.

The risk of cardiomyopathy to young men from mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 actually decreases after the third dose, although the risk is always higher from even a single infection with the virus.

Jay Bhattacharya has been a major purveyor of disinformation around COVID, from masks to vaccines to other public-health efforts, and he’s built a huge following. Now he’s about to get a big cash windfall from a large right-wing foundation. The grift is profitable.

A new firm that includes disinformation reporter Ben Collins as as CEO bought the Onion from the turkey vultures at G/O Media.

Iowa universities are closing their DEI programs after Republicans there passed a bill banning such endeavors.

Measles cases are rising in the U.S. and it’s a big, underreported problem.

The PEN literary awards’ annual ceremony has been cancelled after a large number of authors requested that their works be removed from consideration.

2023 ended with a surge in book bans, according to PEN America, but the children’s publishing world has responded by flooding the market with new titles representing diverse perspectives.

The Atlantic has an appreciation of John Sterling (tied, a bit tenuously, to AI). My confession: Even when I was an ardent Yankees fan, I didn’t care for Sterling’s style, which always seemed to put himself front and center over the game he was calling.

The Guardian interviewed Lauren Mayberry on going solo and the misogyny she experienced online.

Also in the Guardian, a profile of two professors teaching the Gullah language, one of the only creole tongues based on English, including Harvard’s Sunn m’Cheaux (who is a great follow on Threads). Gullah is still spoken on some of the islands off the coast of South Carolina, and you may be familiar with it if you’ve read Pat Conroy’s book The Water is Wide.

There’s finally been some movement to pass legislation banning deepfake nudes, with over 20 states doing so or at least considering bills to do so, and the impetus is teenage girls who often find themselves the targets.

A former model decided to listen to some online wellness influencers rather than her doctors, choosing an all-juice diet to try to treat her stage 3 cancer. She nearly died before doctors convinced her to go the medicine route – but only after she kept refusing for several days while in intensive care.

Time flowed five times slower right after the Big Bang. Imagine all the extra board games you could have played!

Some light reading: Here’s the complete genome for SARS-CoV-2.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, book banning, coffee, death penalty, gaza, iowa, Languages, links, longreads, nevada, physics, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 30, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/24.

I had two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, my annual season predictions post and scouting notes on the Nationals’ Futures Game at Nats Park. I wanted to do a chat, but about 20 minutes before I was going to do it, our Internet went down for four hours. Good times.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Wyrmspan, the new standalone sequel/spinoff to Wingspan, adding a few rules changes to make it more complex while also replacing the birds with dragons.

I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson this week for RogerEbert.com about baseball movies, good, bad, and horrendous. I also appeared on WGN-TV to talk Cubs/White Sox.

I did indeed send around another issue of my free email newsletter, which you should definitely subscribe to if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece on the campus climate shift around the Israel-Hamas war by Stanford student Theo Baker, who wrote the story on former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s role in faked research that led to his resignation, is one of the best things I’ve read this year. Baker takes a stance while maintaining balance throughout the piece, and this quote sums up the situation in Palo Alto and many other campuses that are caught between protecting freedom of expression and ensuring a safe environment for students: “The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong.”
New York looks at the toxic personal history of pop-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who seems to have a history of psychological manipulation of the women in his life.
New York also has a story from John Herrman on how the pornbots all over Twitter actually try to scam users.
The American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik looks at how Boeing drove its best engineers out of the company, leading to the small problem of its planes falling apart or crashing. They had the help of the federal government, which has increasingly outsourced regulation of private companies to the companies themselves. It’s wrapped within the story of longtime Boeing employee turned whistleblower John Barnett, who was found dead recently of a gunshot wound to the temple – between days of his deposition in his case against Boeing.
Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb has been investigating whether Leonard Leo’s nonprofits violated their tax status by paying his for-profit companies for various services. Republicans aligned with Leo, who helped Trump pack the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with extreme conservatives, are now attacking Schwalb for doing his job.
The same is happening to people trying to combat online disinformation around vaccines and COVID-19, as this Atlantic story on the mostly futile efforts to get state medical boards to sanction doctors who spread false information explains.
Billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass now owns a sizable share of Donald Trump’s Truth Social after it merged with a shell company in which Yass’s investment firm owned about 2%.
Remember how a number of kids who caught COVID-19 pre-vaccines ended up near death with MIS-C, a major inflammatory reaction to the virus? Vaccination significantly reduces the risk that kids will get it.
Long COVID is becoming less common thanks to the vaccines, but many people are still dealing with its long-term effects.
Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, raided the wrong house in April 2021, confusing one Arab family with another in the same neighborhood. Now the cops are refusing to share bodycam footage in the family’s lawsuit, claiming it might “damage officers’ reputations.” Duh.
Author Vernor Vinge, who won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, died this week at 79. I didn’t love his writing, but he ranks among the best sci-fi authors for his ability to foresee the growth of technology and its rising role in the social order.
Elon Musk tried to use the Center for Countering Digital Hate for reporting fairly on Twitter’s failure to police antisemitic content, and he lost the case in embarrassing fashion. This wasn’t the only bad news for Twitter, as the site has seen its user base collapse in the last six months.
New research found increasing numbers of Americans leaving their religions and citing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and doctrines as well as the endless cycle of sex-abuse scandals in churches as the main reasons.
A study published in JAMA says that Texas leads the U.S. in rapes and rape-related pregnancies in the wake of the overturning of Roe and that state’s mad rush to ~~control women~~ enact an abortion ban.
The wife of the judge in the mifepristone case now before the Supreme Court was herself paid by the anti-abortion group suing to subvert the FDA’s authority.
New Hampshire Public Radio spoke to a 15-year-old trans girl in New Hampshire whose ability to play soccer is now under attack, as House Republicans in the Live Free or Die state just passed a bill to ban trans girls from playing middle or high school sports. These bills & laws “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist while ruining the lives of a very small number of vulnerable children.
The Republican assault on higher education continues in red states across the south and west: Tennessee Republicans wiped out the HBCU Tennessee State’s board so the Governor can stock it with his appointees, over the objections of Black legislators. South Carolina Republicans passed a ban on DEI initiatives at public universities. The University of Kentucky’s President is moving to dissolve the faculty senate and move its policy-making power to the Board of Trustees. Meanwhile, the NAACP’s CEO Derrick Johnson is urging Black student-athletes to reconsider their college choices in the face of these attacks on higher ed, explicitly targeting Florida schools in a statement earlier this month.
Tabletopper Games has a crowdfunding effort for a new semi-cooperative game, Under Our Sun, with an interesting world-building theme.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, colleges, coronavirus, kentucky, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, police, science fiction, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, the swamp, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’ll have two draft-related pieces coming up next week.

At Paste, I reviewed Dragonkeepers, a new family-level game that I found really disappointing, with the wrong mixture of complexity and randomness.

I’ll have a new newsletter out in the next day or two, but you can sign up here – it’s free and always includes links to everything I write.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Color me shocked, but self-help ‘guru’ Jay Shetty has fabricated or embellished much of his background, according to this investigative piece by The Guardian.
Slate’s Chris Molanphy breaks down what the country chart success of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” does and does not mean in actual impact on radio and with country listeners.
Will Leitch wrote about the culture-war takeover of the murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was killed on the same running trail Will and his wife often take in Athens. Because her alleged killer entered the U.S. illegally, the case is now part of the yelling about the so-called “crisis” at the U.S-Mexico border – even though immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people.
Florida’s measles outbreak is due to the state’s active campaigning against childhood vaccinations, so, of course, Fox News is blaming it on migrants.
The state of Indiana has blocked funding to the Kinsey Institute, the world’s top sex-research center, as part of that state’s war on LGBTQ+ rights.
Texas executed Ivan Cantu even though the foreman of the jury that convicted him wrote that he believed the sentence was unjust, as the prosecution hid key evidence that may have bolstered Cantu’s claims of innocence. Just another day in the Lone Star State.
What do you expect from a state where the party that controls all branches of government keeps cozying up to a prominent white supremacist?
A Dallas-area high school canceled a student production of The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard by two bigots because he was gay, after the district passed anti-LGBTQ+ rules last year.
Climate change is driving a surge in cholera cases in central Africa.
An unvaccinated nine-year-old boy in Singapore contracted COVID-19, developed myocarditis from it, and suffered a stroke. His mother says she declined the vaccine for her son because she was worried it would cause myocarditis, a good example of the harm that unfettered disinformation is doing to public health.
Some good medical news: An mRNA ‘vaccine’ to fight pancreatic cancer has entered stage 2 trials. I put the word vaccine in quotes because it’s not a preventative vaccine, but is tailored to specific recipients’ cancers to help train the immune system to fight the rogue cells, particularly those that remain after surgery or chemo.
You would think Arizona, the sunniest state in the U.S., would encourage residents to add solar panels, but the state is bowing to one of its major energy utility companies and adding a “punitive” charge to customers with solar panels. The Arizona Corporation Commission approved a request from utility APS despite failing to evaluate the full impact of these price hikes on consumers.
Missouri’s Attorney General is suing Planned Parenthood for “trafficking” minors to get abortions outside of Gilead.
The death of nonbinary teen Nex Benedict in Owasso, Oklahoma, after several girls beat them to the point where they blacked out, has received a lot of unclear and I think contradictory coverage from major outlets so far. Assigned Media has a solid summary of what we do and don’t know so far and a piece criticizing traditional media for accepting the police & school’s narratives without questioning them.
A married couple in Oregon who taught at Damascus Christian School have been charged with sexually abusing a child there. No drag queens or trans people were involved.
The BBC spoke to several Iranian women who are still protesting the theocratic regime’s requirement that they wear hijabs in public.
Mehdi Hasan announced his new media venture, Zeteo News, which sounds promising, although we’ve certainly seen and heard similar pitches before that haven’t panned out. His work with MSNBC was excellent and I expect him to continue to challenge disinformation and bigotry. I hope there’s enough support to allow him to build the news organization he envisions.
A Beverly Hills middle school is grappling with the spread of AI-generated nudes of students. This issue isn’t going anywhere and I doubt passing laws against the practice is going to do much at this level.
I know you’re shocked, but the construction of Elon Musk’s long-promised Hyperloop in Las Vegas is rife with safety violations.
Two twins from the country of Georgia were sold at birth and separated; they found each other as teenagers thanks to a TV talent show and to TikTok. Amy and Ano are two of thousands of babies who were stolen from hospitals in the Caucasus nation, their mothers told their babies had died, and sold to new families who were often unaware the adoptions were illegal.
Board game news: An expansion for the Restoration Games title Thunder Road is now on Kickstarter and has already cleared $1 million.
A roll-and-write game based on the wonderful board game Cascadia is also on Kickstarter and fully funded already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, climate change, country music, death penalty, frauds, las vegas, links, longreads, missouri, oklahoma, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, florida, guns, harvard, hugo awards, indiana, lgbt rights, links, longreads, new york, philadelphia, religion, seattle, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, west virginia

→ January 27, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/26/24.

The top 100 prospects ranking will run on The Athletic on Monday, February 5^th, followed by the farm system rankings later that week, and the team top 20s start running on February 12^th.

My friend and one-time colleague Chris Crawford has had a tough year, losing his mother and just last week his stepfather while a site for which he was writing & producing podcasts decided to just not pay its people. He started a GoFundMe last week to help cover the mortgage on his parents’ house.

I’ve got a newsletter about 80% written and just need to finish it up this weekend. It’s free and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…
Longreads first: The New York Times reveals the extensive playbook behind the war on “wokeism” and DEI programs at major universities in red states. It’s a coordinated attack, much as the war on trans people and the war on abortion and the war on CRT, yet people keep falling for it – even people at major, nationally-read newspapers.
From the guardian Long Read, how the fact that so many hipster coffee shops look the same exemplifies the “tyranny of the algorithm.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., warned against the evils of militarism, racism, and poverty, yet the media outlets who praise him every January seem quite inured to the existence and impact of those three facets of our society.
Speaking of the death of journalism, a member of the family that runs the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group – the same company that botched a bunch of MLB rights deals – bought the Baltimore Sun and immediately insulted the staff. This Twitter thread has more details on the meeting between David Smith and the Sun’s newsroom.
Right-wing troll Christopher Rufo’s push to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay cited the work of a data scientist with close ties to eugencists and so-called “race scientists.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann, who co-created the famous “hockey stick” graph showing the rapid warming of the planet, sued two conservative hacks who compared him to a serial child molester back in 2012. The case finally reached trial this week. One of the two, National Review’s Mark Steyn, stands by his comments, which I think tells you all you need to know.
Meanwhile, that bastion of leftist thought The Financial Times wrote that the world’s cities are not ready for climate change.
I reviewed R.F. Kuang’s Nebula-winning novel Babel earlier this week, right around the time that news broke that it had been declared ineligible for this year’s Hugo Awards – with zero explanation why. Those awards were held in China, and there’s reason to believe that she and at least one other author were targeted for their views by the Chinese Communist government. The head of the awards committee has steadfastly refused to provide any insight or further details on why it was declared ineligible; I reached out to the committee myself and have received no response. John Scalzi, himself a Hugo winner, wrote about it as well.
We are not ready for the onslaught of disinformation around the 2024 election that’s about to hit us, writes Brandy Zarozny for NBC News.
A midwife on Long Island (of course) faked vaccinations for 1500 children, giving them a worthless homeopathic pill, and won’t serve a day in prison, instead paying a $300,000 fine. I would much rather see her jailed for ten years than ever see someone behind bars for drug charges.
Jared Woodfill (R) is running for the Texas House of Representatives, with an endorsement from the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton. A new lawsuit alleges that Woodfill covered up his former law partner’s Paul Pressler’s rapes of multiple boys even when alerted to Pressler’s crimes.
Big Tech will save no one but itself: Netflix caved to pressure from India’s Hindu nationalist movement by removing a film about a woman overcoming caste prejudice from its service.
Sam Altman really comes off like he has zero empathy for other humans in some of his latest comments about the future of AI.
Aaron Rupar interviewed the man behind the hilarious Twitter account New York Times Pitchbot.
Pitchfork reviewed the 25^th anniversary reissue of Swervedriver’s 99^th Dream album, which was plagued by label troubles and a rapidly shifting British music landscape. The title track is one of their best songs from any era or LP.
Can New Haven-style pizza spread beyond Connecticut? My guess is yes, of course, but most places will offer poor imitations of the real thing.
Asmodee and the LEGO Group jointly announced the fall release of a new board game, Monkey Palace, from two relatively new game designers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, disinformation, diversity, hugo awards, india, journalism, links, longreads, pizza, racism, shoegaze, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ December 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/16/23.

We’re getting busy over on the hot stove front, and this week I wrote about the Shohei Ohtani signing, the Lee Jung-hoo signing (plus two Royals signings and the Yanks-Dodgers trade), the impact of the injuries to Ronny Mauricio and Endy Rodríguez, and the Tyler Glasnow trade for subscribers to the Athletic.

At Paste, I ranked the ten best new boardgames of 2023. It was a hard list to make, with probably 20 games I played this year that I liked enough to include, and at least five more I know that I would probably like enough but haven’t played yet. To give you a little more context, a game like Emerge, which I mentioned in my PAX Unplugged writeup, is absolutely fine and I think a lot of casual players would enjoy it. It didn’t stand a chance of getting on this list.

My free email newsletter is alive and well, and more than a hundred new subscribers have joined the list in the last three weeks since I switched platforms, so thank you and welcome. I’m hoping to keep this up as a weekly endeavor again.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times had two outstanding longreads this week. The first is by graphic designer Giorgia Lupi, who has been struggling with long COVID for three years and describes the disorder in prose and graphics that make it one of the most remarkable pieces I’ve read all year. As a companion, you might read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/author Ed Yong on how covering long COVID has made him a better writer.
The second is also an interactive story, about a 1973 expedition to the summit of Aconcagua that left two Americans dead on the mountain while six others returned, with the truth about how the two died still mired in uncertainty. The story resurfaced literally this year as climate change led to the withdrawal of a glacier that exposed one of the dead climber’s cameras.
The testimony of three university presidents to Congress a few weeks ago that led to the ouster of Penn’s Liz Magill and calls for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign has devolved into claims that Ms. Gay “plagiarized” parts of her dissertation. The Harvard Crimson looks at these claims, line by line, and contacts the authors whose work Ms. Gay allegedly stole. (Spoiler alert: This is a bad-faith argument by right-wing trolls.)
ProPublica looked at one gun store in Indiana that does little to nothing to avoid contributing to the illegal gun trade, and how it impacts communities in Chicago and beyond.
The Intercept obtained a document showing India’s Hindu nationalist government was specifically targeting Sikh separatists in the west, including Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom the Canadian government says was murdered by Indian intelligence agents in June.
Those stories you saw a year or so ago about the ten-figure toll of organized shoplifting gangs? It was all a lie, cooked up by the retail industry’s lobbyists.
Ben Collins, who spent several years on what he called the “dystopia beat” of online hate and disinformation, writes about how the farce of cable news has reached the end of its lifespan, as younger audiences aren’t falling for the fake debates and dichotomies required by CNN, Fox, and their ilk.
Cameron County, Texas, located at the state’s southernmost tip, is prosecuting an 11-year-old boy who was arrested and put into solitary confinement for reporting his principal for bullying. Principal Marta Garza has a history of retaliating against any parents or children who cross her, including calling CPS after one district grandparent challenged the goals set for her 5-year-old grandchild.
The lie of abortion bans was made very clear with this past week’s ruling in Texas against Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was nonviable but was denied an abortion under the state’s bogus “to save the mother’s life” exception.
The Washington Post is laying off experienced journalists – but expanding its increasingly reactionary editorial board, which led to a one-day strike on December 7^th.
Meanwhile, former Post reporter Felicia Sonmez’s lawsuit against the paper reached the DC Appeals Court, where the judges will have to determine whether its editors’ decision to take Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor, off coverage of #MeToo and related stories was discrimination or was a step to maintain objectivity.
First-time author Cait Corrain had her book canceled by its publisher after it came out that she’d review-bombed numerous other authors on Goodreads with various sock-puppet accounts.
A pastor in the United Church of the Kingdom of God was caught on film trying to rid a 16-year-old of “evil spirits,” while another former parishioner said the church tried to convince him to use prayer to become heterosexual when he was 13.
Missouri Rep. Sarah Unsicker (D) has dropped out of the race for the state’s attorney general post after some bizarre behavior, including having a “basil lemonade” with right-wing troll Chuck Johnson and claims that at least one of her opponents is actually an agent of the Israeli government.
Vivek Ramaswamy has now become the new(est) face of the racist, xenophobic Great Replacement Theory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, coronavirus, harvard, india, links, longreads, Media, missouri, stick to baseball, texas

→ December 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/9/23.

Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.

At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.

My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Joel Anderson, who overlapped with me at ESPN for a few years, writes in Slate about ESPN’s abortive attempts to “stick to sports” and the company’s uncertain future.
Mississippi Today exposes a “goon squad” of violent, law-breaking police deputies in Rankin County, home of the state’s capital and largest city, Jackson. The report describes beatings of suspects in petty drug crimes – or no crimes at all – and long prison sentences based on coerced confessions.
A professor at Nevada-Reno began a sexual relationship with one of his students. She’s now accusing him of rape and extortion; he says the relationship was consensual and that she has threatened him and his wife since he ended it. The Chronicle of Higher Education tries to tell the whole story, but isn’t the fact that he had a relationship with a student he oversaw enough to cost him his job? There is no consent with such an imbalance of power.
King Charles is taking the assets of dead Britons and using the money to upgrade properties he owns in his commercial portfolio.
I spent some time this week at the Barista Parlor in East Nashville, but I won’t be back after a reader pointed out that the owners have engaged in union-busting, including closing a shop where workers tried to unionize.
Trump’s lawyers have brought an internet conspiracy theory into one of their filings, accusing a Wisconsin reporter of being a plant at the January 6^th insurrection.
The United States has broken its record for the most mass shootings in a single calendar year, and we still have over three weeks to go.
In defense of the block button.
Young Fathers gave an incredible performance on KEXP, playing four songs from their latest album, Heavy Heavy.
A woman who threw a bowl of hot food in the face of a worker at a Chipotle will serve 30 days in prison and have to work 60 days in fast food. It’s a showy sentence, but I think it’s better than more prison time, and maybe it will build some empathy in the perpetrator.
The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party rejected a proposal to ban associations with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: great britain, guns, links, longreads, metoo, mississippi, Music, nevada, stick to baseball, texas, unions

→ November 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.

After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic column by Simon Sebag Montefiore on the decolonization narrative around Gaza and Israel has been shared, critiqued, attacked, and so on more than anything else I’ve seen on the conflict. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t agree with every point the author makes, but it is thoughtful and does make some very good points. The twenty minutes it took me to read it was time well spent, and I can’t say that about many things I read in general, certainly not on a topic as fraught as this one. Adam Serwer, also in the Atlantic, wrote a shorter piece arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By the way, the staid Financial Times’ editorial board called for a humanitarian cease-fire this week.
This harassment case at UC Berkeley is absolutely bonkers, yet there are students protesting in favor of the professor who harassed a colleague so extensively that she’s been banned from campus – apparently because she’s a person of color and her victim is not?
The Verge’s Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive on “the people who ruined the internet,” search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, asking if they ruined search or if search is even ruined at all.
When LibsofTikTok, the anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account run by former realtor Chaya Raichik, tweets about a hospital, a school, a library, or a private individual, threats of violence follow. USA Today built off research from the liberal group Media Matters to find over two dozen incidents where bomb or death threats followed a LibsofTikTok tweet. She’s particularly targeting public schools, with USA Today identifying at least twelve incidents where a school received threats after she tweeted about it.
The New York Times has the story of a French case where a 15-year-old girl falsely accused a 17-year-old boy, the son of Moroccan immigrants, of raping her, only to recant 23 years later. This very humanist retelling looks at the toll the false accusation took on Farid El Haïry’s life even though he only spent a year or so in prison, and how difficult it still is for him to move on.
JAMA has yet another study showing that masks work in limiting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. I do still wear one when traveling, at least, since it’s the one time I’m in proximity to a lot of strangers. Very few others do, even on airplanes.
There’s a rising trend of hidden MLMs on TikTok, pushed by self-styled ‘experts’ selling detoxification products for kids. Just a reminder that for almost every human, the liver handles detox responsibilities. You don’t need anything else.
Increased belief in false health information is driving vaccine acceptance down. Looking forward to the return of preventable childhood diseases!
STIs are on the rise as states found out they’re not getting the last two years’ worth of a $1 billion federal program to fight these infections as the program was cut during the debt ceiling deal.
A new preprint (meaning it’s not peer-reviewed yet) available on the SocArXiv server argues that merely platforming extreme right-wing actors normalizes their viewpoints even in the face of critical interviewing or coverage. In other words, sunshine may not always be the best disinfectant.
Related: Stew Peters, who hosts a program on Rumble and has a sizable following on Twitter, called for shooting Catholic Charities workers who help would-be immigrants to the United States. Peters has had some prominent figures as guests on his show, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Arizona Republicans Kari Lake, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams is now under investigation for possible illegal campaign donations from the Turkish government.
Mayor Adams and new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have something in common – both believe, and say, that they were put in their positions by God. God is, as the article says, unavailable for comment.
Several House Republicans introduced a bill to expel Palestinians from the United States, because it’s 1933.
WIRED covers some myths and truths about smartphone batteries.
Littleton, New Hampshire, is considering banning public art because some folks didn’t like a diversity mural that was partly organized by a local Pride group. One of the town’s three council members makes no bones about bringing her religion into her government job, saying that the Bible says that “homosexuality is an abomination.”
Speaking of bans, Republicans are trying to Newspeak their way out of their abortion-banning policies – the word “ban” appears at least six times in relation to abortion in the Republican Party platform – by pushing back on the use of the word “ban” at all. They’re testing this out in Virginia, which has legislative elections on Tuesday, and if they succeed there, they’ll roll this out nationwide for next November.
A lawsuit in Texas, filed there by an anti-abortion activist to try to get the most favorable court possible, could bankrupt Planned Parenthood by making specious claims that the nonprofit needs to return reimbursements to Medicaid.
An Alabama mayor and pastor killed himself after he was outed as LGBTQ+. A right-wing news site posted photos of F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in women’s clothing and claimed he referred to himself as a trans woman.
HBO CEO Corey Bloys used sockpuppet and burner accounts to try to troll and deride critics of the channel’s programming or of him personally.
There’s a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe caused by a lack of access to clean water.
The BBC examines the dark side of touch-screen tipping, and some of the psychology involved in why we tip more on these platforms.
Over at Field of Schemes, Neil deMause exposes how Jackson County, Missouri, might actually give the Royals over $6 billion in funding for a new stadium the team doesn’t need.
I linked a few weeks ago to the dubious reason that Target was giving for the closure of some Seattle stores, citing rising crime. Popular.info found data showing those stores were affected less by crime than those in surrounding areas. Do not just take corporations’ words as gospel.
The wonderful, quirky Weckerly’s Ice Cream in Fishtown, Philadelphia, is closing in December.
Here’s a nice palate cleanser: GQ interviewed Danny DeVito.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, coronavirus, health, links, longreads, middle east, misinformation, new hampshire, new york, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ October 28, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road, revisits the topic of the former book, the recently-solved Long Island serial killer case, in a long story on how Suffolk County police botched the investigation for over a decade thanks to infighting, corruption, and incompetence. The story mentions the murder of John Pius, which happened in my hometown when I was about five. Kolker is going to appear on my podcast in November to discuss Hidden Valley Road, about a family with ten sons, six of whom developed schizophrenia.
The CBC has a long investigative piece on singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous heritage, which appear to be false based on her birth certificate showing two white European-descended parents. Sainte-Marie’s public and commercial image were very closely tied to her claimed native identity, including a much-loved appearance on Sesame Street in1975.
Vermont’s Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center was closed in 2020 after years of allegations of abuse and neglect of the young people in the center’s care. Seven Days has the harrowing story of one young woman whose life was destroyed by her time at the facility.
Another police misconduct story, this one from Dallas, where a Black man who had the same name as a suspect at large found himself assaulted by cops and then arrested on a bogus charge, triggering a cascade of events that cost him his job and his house. He’s suing the police department and the city, neither of which has compensated him in any way for the actions of their officers.
I’d never heard of the pop artist Devon Rodriguez, but I have now, after an art critic who reviewed his work found himself the target of an online mob stirred up by Rodriguez himself, who appears to have skin thinner than tengujo paper.
A site aimed at helping people commit suicide, even connecting them with people who’d sell them the drugs to do it, was ignored for years by UK authorities, leading to 50 or more preventable deaths.
CVS revealed it won’t sell cold medicines with phenylephrine, since the so-called decongestant doesn’t actually work. So why are they still selling so-called “homeopathic” remedies that also don’t work?
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, recently, and writes that it’s lovely and is being strangled by tourism.
Clarence Thomas took a loan from a friend for $267,230, and then the friend just flat-out forgave it before Thomas paid down any principal. Thomas, of course, never reported this on financial disclosure reports.
Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist, writes in the New York Times on how Palestinians are, in her words, expected to “audition” for empathy and compassion.
Also in the Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that the rightward shift as voters get older is happening less with each succeeding generation. One effect of making it harder for people to buy houses (and thus get mortgages) is that they don’t experience the drift towards fiscal conservatism/desire to pull up the ladder behind them. Oh well!
The skin disease leishmaniasis is now endemic in the United States. It’s spread by sandflies, and their habitats are expanding thanks to climate change.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to ban no-fault divorce. This is disastrous for people in abusive marriages, but also, my marriage is none of your fucking business.
Historian Kevin Kruse is leaving Twitter, which matters because he was one of the more prominent voices countering political disinformation on the site, which, as he says, is undergoing enshittification and becoming a white nationalist utopia like Truth Social and Gab. NBC has a story on how LGBTQ+ people are leaving Twitter as well, citing the site’s increasingly toxic atmosphere and Musk’s decisions to allow deadnaming, misinformation, and hate speech to run rampant on the platform. I’ll be there as long as many of you are, but I’m on Bluesky (@keithlaw.bsky.social), Threads (@mrkeithlaw, same as Instagram), and Spoutible (@keithlaw) as well.
The Times had a good story on how sports Twitter is still hanging in there, relatively speaking.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of the new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Nocturne, the latest game from the publishers of Cascadia and Fit to Print, is live now and already at $64K with 41 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, frauds, health, links, longreads, mental health, police, pseudoscience, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, true crime, vermont

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