the swamp

→ January 10, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/10/26.

I had one story this week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the Cubs’ trade for Edward Cabrera. I’m spending most of my time right now working on the annual prospect rankings, which are tentatively slated to run starting January 26^th with the top 100.

At AV Club, I reviewed the flip-and-write game Ra and Write, which borrows the theme from the auction game Ra but doesn’t have many similarities beyond that; and Propolis, a bee-themed engine-builder in a small box.

I’m trying to squeeze in another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend before the heavy phone work resumes on Monday. We’ll see how that works out for me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of how a down-on-his-luck private detective named Brad Dennis helped find “Torswats,” a teenager who made well over 300 swatting calls to schools, universities, and other targets, when the FBI appeared not to take the case very seriously at all. The culprit, Alan Filion, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to four charges, while it appears that the case has sent Dennis in the wrong direction. (Unrelated, but the swatter Dennis knew in the early 2000s who ended up targeting him eventually was charged and convicted, then died quite young in 2023.)

The New York Times investigates how a teenager died while working at the Nebraska pork production factory Pillen Family Farms, founded by now Gov. Jim Pillen (R), while two years have produced no charges or even explanations for the minor’s family. Maybe Morrissey was right: meat is murder.

In the National Catholic Reporter, John Grosso calls out JD Vance’s gross misuse of both his platform and his soi-disant Catholic faith to blame murder victim Renee Good for her own killing, referring to Vance’s actions as a “a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.” I’m secular now, but grew up Catholic and certainly understand the tenets of that religion enough to say ‘hell yeah.’

Ben Lorber at Religion Dispatches points out that Elon Musk openly endorsed a white nationalist position and nobody has said a thing about it.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal reveals how lobbyists are charging $1 million to secure a pardon from President Trump.

WIRED explains what the “quantum apocalypse,” where existing cryptographic methods would become obsolete almost overnight, might mean for our society and the global economy.

The #3 official at the Interior Department didn’t disclose that her husband held a multi-million dollar water rights contract with a lithium mine that her department approved. That story ran a week ago, and there’s been absolutely nothing since then – I don’t see a single member of Congress so much as calling for an investigation.

An Ohio teenager died from the flu despite being otherwise healthy, because the flu can kill a healthy person. Get vaccinated.

An unvaccinated person with the measles visited the Ark Encounter fiction park in Kentucky, which, well, a person who doesn’t believe in science visited an entire theme park built around ignorance of science.

An NBC News investigation into 31 states that provide county-or other below state-level data found that 70% of jurisdictions have fallen below the herd immunity vaccination rate for pertussis, which is why whooping cough cases are now soaring in this stupid country.

Utah theocrats are pushing to end all gender-affirming care for minors despite a report from the state’s Health and Human Services Department finding positive outcomes from such treatment. Keep your nonsense religion out of my house, please.

Montana revoked the medical license of a quack doctor who diagnosed healthy patients with cancer and treated them with chemotherapy and opioids, killing at least one of them in the process. This came about due to investigative reports from ProPublica, which found that the state renewed Thomas Weiner’s medical license twice despite complaints about his conduct.

The Intercept calls on Democrats to fight back against the MAGA machine’s attempts to destroy trans people, which is straight out of the totalitarian playbook.

Kansas’ Governor Laura Kelly (D) has claimed the deal for a new NFL stadium that provides $4 billion in subsidies to the Chiefs will not cost anything in new taxes. Field of Schemes explains why that’s a lie.

The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence wrote about how Sinners became the most culturally important film of 2025.

Here are 19 artists who pulled their music from Spotify in 2025.

The notoriously left-wing Financial Times walks us through the executives at “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.”

A former Times editor spoke about what she perceived as anti-trans bias coming from the top levels at the newspaper. The Times responded, although the paper’s response does not provide evidence to counter the former employee’s claims.

The city of Wilmington announced a plan to have a local nonprofit manage an encampment for homeless people within the city. Mayor John Carney, formerly the Governor of Delaware, had campaigned on making housing and combating homelessness a priority, but this is the first move forward on that front after his decision in October to ban other encampments and step up enforcement against people with nowhere else to go.

Denny Carter writes at his Bad Faith Times how popularism has failed miserably in the UK and Democrats need to give up that strategy entirely.

A new study found that playing tabletop and/or role-playing games provides social, educational, and therapeutic benefits, especially for neurodivergent players.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter up for the latest expansion to the Set a Watch series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2025 in music, anti-science, board game news, delaware, kansas, labor rights, links, longreads, religion, social media, stadium scams, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ December 20, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/20/25.

I got sick out of the winter meetings, so I’ve been slacking on the Saturday posts (and blogging and my newsletter in general). Here are the breakdowns I’ve written for subscribers to the Athletic in the last two weeks, at least:

Over at AV Club, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2025, and reviewed the games The White Castle Duel and Trinket Trove.

I have a few writing things to get done this weekend but I really hope to get another (free) newsletter out before Christmas Day. You can sign up here.

I also appeared on the Cubs Weekly podcast with my friend Lance Brodzowski to talk some Cubs prospects and what it might take to get Mackenzie Gore (very, very hypothetically).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A Mother Jones journalist asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth’s mentor. Serial fabulist Jack Posobiec responded with threats.

ProPublica looks at the deaths that resulted from the USAID cuts that Trump, Musk, and company celebrated with cake.

New Humanist looks at Finnish schools’ efforts to teach critical thinking so students can better detect fake news and misinformation.

Brown alumna Lucy Feldman writes in TIME about why the mass shooting at the university hit her (and so many Brown graduates) so hard.

Also in Mother Jones, serial plagiarist and Russian operative Benny Johnson has become a major propagandist and content creator for the White House.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) diverted taxpayer funds for child welfare and health care to pay for his own consultants and advertisements, according to a report in the Tampa Bay Times.

My Congresswoman, Rep. Sarah McBride (D), spoke out about her experience as a trans woman as the House prepared to pass two bills designed just to make trans peoples’ lives hell.

Ohio Republicans are trying to groom and indoctrinate kids by putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s social studies curriculum that mandated all kinds of Christian nonsense, noting that the changes were rammed through without adequate debate or public notice.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) encouraged his Twitter followers to follow accounts belonging to a white supremacist and someone who has posted CSAM, and he doubled down when Westword called him out on it.

U.S. students read fewer books than ever; the article points out that teachers assign fewer full-length books, in part because of the belief that kids won’t read them, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other potential causes are state book bans and don’t-say-gay laws, social media, AI, and a privately produced reading curriculum called StudySync that leans more on excerpts.

An ICE supervisor in Cincinnati was arrested for trying to strangle his partner, who is at least 22 years his younger as well.

ICE arrested a woman in Minnesota merely for observing their agents arresting someone and asking what they were doing.

Plastic pollution is on track to double by 2040, entering the soil, the oceans, and of course, our bodies.

A proposed data center in Chandler, Arizona, won’t disclose how much water it expects to use. You know, in a desert.

NPR looks at Syria a year after the fall of Assad.

Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Grassfed is “a farm to tabletop” game from the publishers of Ascension and Shards of Infinity, and Chess Joker is a new game from Carl Chudyk, co-designer of Glory to Rome and designer of Innovation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, books, climate change, delaware, environment, florida, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, ohio, oklahoma, stick to baseball, syria, the swamp, trans rights

→ 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 15, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/15/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I wait for a trade or signing to write up. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday here on the dish.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed Vantage, the new open-world cooperative game from designer Jamey Stegmaier (Tapestry, Scythe); it’s like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books converted to the tabletop, but despite incredible art and a massive amount of content in the box, I found it frustrating to try to play.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, finally. I’ve gotten a bit stuck with one or two of the ideas I’ve had for newsletters and I think that held me back from writing one.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A group of New York-based investors used a loan program designed to help revitalize disused properties in Baltimore to borrow over $100 million to buy properties, and then default on the loans, screwing over lenders, tenants, and the Baltimore housing market in general.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a tax dodge to avoid paying over $900,000 in taxes from 2021-23. He now oversees the IRS.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem steered a $220 million contract to a firm to which she is closely tied, skipping the competitive bidding process by claiming there’s an “emergency” at the border with Mexico.

I don’t understand why this has received so little attention, but the Senate passed a bill that would wipe out the U.S. cannabis industry, which will do significant economic harm to a nascent industry and to the states that have benefited from taxing an activity that is just going to move underground anyway.

KFF Health News looks at the destruction wrought by Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025, on our public health infrastructure. Holding these people accountable if and when they ever lose power is going to be crucial to preventing a recurrence.

Canada culled a flock of ostriches where at least some were infected with the H5N1 avian flu, despite some ridiculous interference and protests from anti-vax nut jobs. The ostrich farmers in question tried to hide the infections and didn’t follow requirements for basic biosafety.

Meanwhile, two longtime anti-vax grifters are now overseeing the FDA’s vaccine regulation program.

The unionized writers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been on strike for over three years now, but finally got their day in court and won a ruling that covers management’s violations back to 2020.

Child rapist and cult leader Warren Jeffs went to prison over a decade ago, but the harm he inflicted on his community continues, as measles has swept through Colorado City because he preached that vaccines were part of a government plot to make people infertile.

The resident of a home in Whitestown, Indiana, shot and killed a cleaning woman who went to the wrong house. Police have yet to name the shooter, who could (should!) face criminal charges.

A corrupt police chief in Marion County, Kansas, abused his power to raid the offices of a tiny local newspaper there in 2023 to prevent the Marion County Record from publishing a story about a local restaurant owner who may have lied on her liquor license application. This week, the county agreed to pay $3 million to the paper’s publisher and several of the journalists. The chief, who later resigned, is still facing criminal charges.

The husband of Michigan Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson (D) is the VP of development for a company planning to build a massive data center in the state over objections from the local community. At best, it’s a huge conflict of interest.

This is how you write a fair and honest obituary: James Watson “co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism.” We do not have to paper over the misdeeds of the deceased to comply with some dated sense of decorum. Watson was part of one of the most significant discoveries of the 20^th century. He was also a racist asshole.

A 13-year-old girl in Louisiana was expelled (and later reinstated on probation) for hitting a classmate who made and distributed a deepfake porn image of her. Her parents notified the school, which appears to have taken no action against the boy.

This LitHub piece is well worth reading if only for how it explains why the phrase “Critics say” should not appear in serious journalism. You need to name those critics and show what they’re saying and why it might be valid.

Alex Berenson, dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man” for his consistently incorrect predictions about first the spread of the virus and then the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines against it, lost his lawsuit claiming the federal government “censored” him when Twitter nuked his account in 2021. He’s still making bank from his Substack newsletter, though.

A student from Colorado Academy applied early decision to Tulane and was accepted, but later backed out. The university then punished the entire school with a one-year ban on early-decision applications.

Chile named its Miss World winner this past week, which is newsworthy because Ignacia Fernández is also a death-metal vocalist for the band Decessus and even gave a performance as such in the finals. There are very few female vocalists in that particular subgenre; I could only name two without searching, Arch Enemy (Alissa White-Gluz) and the defunct Nuclear Death (Lori Bravo).

The Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter writes about the Dodgers’ partnership with Phillips 66, a fossil-fuel company driving the same climate change that’s feeding the devastating wildfires that hit California just about every year.

Mystic Lands, the sequel/update to the card-crafting game Mystic Vale, has six days left on its successful Kickstarter (although I am surprised it hasn’t raised more money given the original’s popularity).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, cannabis, cults, death metal, first amendment, frauds, guns, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, michigan, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, unions, vaccines

→ October 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

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

→ October 7, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic recently, although I’ll make up for that later this month. My latest review at Endless Mode looks at the new edition of the Reiner Knizia game Botswana, a family-level bidding game that has been published under a half-dozen names, including one edition by Milton Bradley in a traditional mass-market size under the name Quandary.

Now that this is up, I’ll work on another edition of my free email newsletter next. The next Stick to Baseball post will run on the 18th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Billionaire Amy Griffin took psychedelics and “remembered” past sexual abuse by a grade-school teacher. She wrote a memoir about it … but no one can confirm any of the details, and she may have just ruined an innocent man’s life.

ProPublica detailed the 94 million pounds of food aid cancelled by the Trump Administration, hurting poor communities – including many in red states – and farmers as well. Meanwhile, PBS documents federal cuts to pediatric brain cancer research.

Jack Posobiec made himself famous by pushing the whole Pizzagate hoax, and continues to spread lies and misinformation on behalf of Republicans, now doing so as some sort of consultant on voter fraud. It turns out he’s been voting in Pennsylvania while living in Maryland.

The Huffington Post spoke to Leonard Peltier, who is now under home confinement after spending 47 years in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit, about being slightly free and the threat Trump poses to indigenous Americans.
A New Jersey teenager stalked a girl who rejected him, even describing some of his actions on his Youtube channel, and after police did nothing, he drove his car at 70 mph at the girl and her friend while the two were on their bikes, killing them. Did police fail to react because his father’s a cop?

I wasn’t aware of “SIM farms” until the Secret Service announced they’d discovered a huge one in New York City; WIRED explains why they’re such a threat to our infrastructure.

Bluesky is dealing with its first real existential crisis, as noted anti-trans crusader Jesse Singal appears to have violated the site’s TOS, after which Bluesky execs … altered the TOS? TechCrunch and the blog Azhdarchid both delved into the controversy, including Bluesky CEO Jay Gruber throwing a tantrum on the site over it.

Writer Kaleb Horton died suddenly of a seizure in September, and shortly afterwards an AI-generated slop book supposedly about him appeared on Amazon.

There’s a new book-club scam targeting authors, asking them to pay to get their books before ‘clubs’ that have no actual members, just AI bots.

It’s gotten very little attention here in all the chaos, but the Trump Administration is bailing out Trump ally Javier Milei, whose mismanagement of Argentina’s economy and alleged corruption have put the country on the brink, a $20 billion deal that also happens to help billionaire hedge-fund manager Rob Citrone, a buddy of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Where does that money come from? Maybe the $18 billion in infrastructure projects for blue New York City Trump is trying to cancel.

Meta plans to open a data center in Louisiana that will require more energy than the entire city of New Orleans. It’s really well past time to tax these massive energy sinks for the externalities they’re generating.

South Carolina theocrats are trying to pass the nation’s most draconian abortion ban over opposition from doctors and medical experts. Abortion bans kill pregnant people. They are not ‘pro-life’ in any sense of the term.

A Christian church leader in Miami had fifty-seven slaves – excuse me, “forced laborers” – in her mansion when FBI agents raided it in August. Michelle Brannon and her partner David Taylor are also accused of running a money laundering scheme, while Taylor is accused of sexual harassment.

Ever wonder who’s really funding the anti-trans movement? Turns out a lot of the money comes from fossil-fuel companies, apparently using attacks on trans rights as an insidious way to install climate deniers in office.

The Daily Caller, a fake-news site influential with the current Administration, called for conservatives to commit acts of violence in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Also underreported: Trump declared that people who are “anti-Christian” are terrorists.

Meanwhile, Trump supposedly answered questions from Jake Tapper over text message, despite a history of the President eschewing text or email. There’s no confirmation the person responding was actually Trump and it has led to new speculation about his declining health.

The Alabama owners of three small Alaska newspapers edited an article to remove reference to Charlie Kirk’s “racist and controversial views,” leading to the resignation of three of the writers – which left one of the papers without any journalists on staff.

A new documentary called The Alabama Solution shows the horrific conditions inside that state’s prison system, using smuggled smartphones to film and photograph the awful state of the facilities. It premieres Friday on HBO.

Six babies in Israel have died from measles-related complications since May and a seventh will have to have all four limbs amputated, thanks to the work of anti-vaccine lunatics who’ve brought the highly contagious virus back from the edge of eradication.

There’s a Kickstarter up for expansions to three games published by Cranio: Barrage, Golem, and the Rats of Wister, the last of which I hated when I played it.

And another for an expansion to Return to Dark Tower, along with a new printing of the sold-out base game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alaska, artificial intelligence, board game news, energy, frauds, links, longreads, new jersey, police, prison culture, scams, south carolina, stick to baseball, 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

→ September 20, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/20/25.

At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.

For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED’s Katie Drummond interviewed Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince, who has some wildly progressive views on content, AI, and the future of the Internet.

In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote how pundits and politicians are sanitizing the legacy of Charlie Kirk.

The Times reported on two deals that allowed the Trumps to pocket billions from their cryptocurrency while giving the U.A.E. access to computer chips.

Guardian columnist Helen Pidd attended the far-right rally in the UK led by white nationalist Tommy Robinson and wrote that this dangerous movement is only going to grow from here.

Quanta explains an unsolved problem in computer science for the longest-running six-rule computer program, known as the Busy Beaver Challenge.

Defector reports on the sketchy goings-on at the Savannah Bananas’ charity arm.

NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.

The Washington Post, formerly a great American newspaper, fired editor and columnist Karen Attiah for speaking out about gun violence in the wake of the shooting of Kirk.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, according to a UN Commission report released this week. Undeterred, Israel continued moving ground forces into Gaza City, displacing thousands more Palestinians.

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.

Disney’s decision to bow to the Trump Administration and take Jimmy Kimmel off the air is further evidence of the assault on the First Amendment. So are the dozens of teachers and professors fired for their comments on Kirk and his death.

Meanwhile, even though Kirk’s (alleged) murderer was a white man, Black Americans are receiving death threats over it, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.

Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ reached out to all 48 Illinois college instructors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” and detailed the harassment they’ve received as a result, including death threats.

The Department of Education is ending discretionary funding to multiple grant programs for colleges that primarily serve minority students, because DEI.

The attorneys general of nine blue states have joined the National Women’s Law Center to pledge to fight to protect the rights of trans students, just as the ultra-right Heritage Foundation wants the Administration to brand trans activistists as terrorists.

Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen at the macroscopic level until now.

Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, disney, first amendment, frauds, gaza, georgia, great britain, links, longreads, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

→ September 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/6/25.

Over at The Athletic, I wrote some brief updates & outlooks for five prospects called up on August 31^st/September 1^st, and an in-person scouting notebook on Guardians pitcher Joey Oakie plus some other Guards, Orioles, Nats, and Phillies prospects.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the one vs. many game 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the player who takes on the HAL role does indeed get to close the pod bay doors. It’s a good game, Dave.

I’ve moved my free email newsletter over to Kit, away from the place that proudly hosts white nationalist newsletters.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED story on a venture capitalist, Cindy Bi, who hired a surrogate to carry her baby, and is now trying to destroy the woman’s life after she miscarried, is absolutely batshit. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Bi actually hurt her legal case, but she certainly tanked her own reputation by talking to writer Emi Nietfeld, who did a great job telling the story.
Maclean’s has a story from a former anti-vaxxer who now tries to convince the deluded and the ignorant that vaccines are, in fact, safe and effective.
Former Dodgers & Expos GM Kevin Malone, who called himself “Dodger Boy” and said “there’s a new sheriff in town” before spending several years as one of the worst GMs in Dodger history, is now an adviser to President Trump on human trafficking, because he became a religious nut and joined one of those activist groups that claims it’s fighting human trafficking (and actually isn’t helping at all).
The Trump Administration is trying to tag several politicians with mortgage fraud for allegedly claiming more than one primary residence on loan applicants. At least three Cabinet members have done the same thing, ProPublica found in an investigation. It’s almost like this isn’t actually about mortgage fraud!
ProPublica also wrote about how xenophobes and white nationalists are co-opting climate change as a justification for their proposed policies.
Yale epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation that RFK Jr. needs to resign or be forced out immediately as head of Health & Human Services.
Benny Johnson was fired for multiple acts of plagiarism. He became a right-wing podcaster and charlatan, posting lie after lie on social media, and took money from the Russian government to do so. He’s now a darling of the Trump White House.
A reserve captain in the Israel Defense Forces who served in Gaza wrote in the New York Times that fellow reservists should refuse to fight in this unjust war. His words: “With over 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead, according to Gazan health authorities, and growing starvation in the territory, with Israeli hostages languishing for nearly two years, this war has crossed every boundary. There is no longer any goal worth achieving by prolonging the war.”
Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) are demanding that Wikipedia dox its own editors because of some bullshit claim about editorial bias. Where are the free speech absolutists now?
The matcha drink craze has led to a shortage of the green tea product, which has cultural significance in Japan, as influencers need their grass-flavored iced milk beverages.
Harvard won the latest round in its legal battles against the Trump Administration, as a judge ordered the White House to restore funding it had cut, but my alma mater continues to comply in small but meaningful ways with the fascists, this time removing designated spaces for the women’s center and the office for LGBTQ+ students.
Yahoo! sportswriter Matt Ufford writes that Bluesky has plenty of users, and the complaints to the contrary seem to miss the point or stem from individuals’ bad experiences with, well, getting called out for their bullshit.
The great Elie Mystal writes about the power of small acts of noncompliance, and the overemphasis on “big” acts of resistance.
Allplay has a Kickstarter for a new edition of the grail game Container, which runs $100+ for a used copy. It’s an economic simulation game about shipping containers, which sounds dry as hell, but people love this game. It’s been out of print since the 2018 tenth anniversary edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tea, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

→ 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

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