the swamp — Page 3

→ January 9, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/9/21.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the trade that sent Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets for four players. Just about everything else is on hold as I have started work on the top 100 prospects package, which will run on or around February 1^st.

I will, however, keep writing my free email newsletter this month, with the next issue probably going out by Monday. My thanks to all of you who bought – or asked for – either of my books this holiday season. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books.

And now, the links…

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) lost his son to suicide on New Year’s Eve, and then survived the terror attack on the Capitol this week. The Atlantic spoke to him about this awful sequence of events. The Congressman and his wife wrote a beautiful, heartfelt eulogy to their son after his death.
This was a coup, and it should lead to impeachment.
The Kansas City Star called for Sen. Josh Hawley to resign or be removed, as members of his own party condemn his words and actions.
“They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” The Nation‘s Andrew McCormick reports from the scene of the assault.
The woman who was shot and killed while breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby was an Air Force veteran who fell for the QAnon hoax and other right-wing bullshit spread online.
How can we fight the flood of false information that led hundreds of Americans to storm the Capitol and scream nonsense about auditing the vote? The Guardian spoke to multiple experts, but there are no simple answers: Disinformation spreads easily, but combating it is harder.
George Saunders believes social media is killing us. He’s also thinking about writing an epic novel along the lines of the Russian classics.
A lawsuit over a high school punishing a student for her use of foul language on Snapchat could alter free speech rights for students across the country.
Federal disaster aid disproportionately helps affluent communities and exacerbates racial and economic disparities.
The EPA just adopted a new rule making it harder for regulators to use data that aren’t available to the public, yet another way in which the outgoing Administration is making it easier for companies and individuals to despoil the environment with impunity.
There’s a Danish children’s show about a man who can’t control his enormous penis.
Just two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has begun attacks against Tigrayan dissidents in the north of the country and now has fallen out with their neighbors in Sudan.
The BBC has an ode to the alfajor, the most popular cookie in South America.
A clinical social worker tells of the hospice patient who told him of a ghost he saw who changed his view of life.
Board game news: there’s a new Kickstarter for the very intriguing game Darwin’s Journey, co-designed by Simone Luciani, the designer of Tzolk’in and Tekhenu.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, cookies, hoaxes, links, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ December 12, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/12/20.

I wrote one piece this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Lance Lynn and Carlos Santana signings and the Angels’ trades for two guys named Iglesias.

For Paste, I ranked the top fifteen new board games of 2020, which range from a game suitable for kids as young as 4-5 to a crunchy two-hour dice-drafter.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Tony Paul, who’s covered the Tigers for ages for the Detroit News, talking about the Tigers, what it’s like to cover a bad team, and how baseball can improve its efforts on diversity.

I have two books out for the readers on your holiday shopping lists. The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, available in hardcover; and Smart Baseball, available in paperback.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for more essays from me and summaries of everything I’ve written between issues of the newsletter.

And now, the links…

Before I get to the longreads, two stories relevant to the Georgia runoffs: Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband bought stock in companies likely to benefit from the CARES bill while she was working on it, while Sen. David Purdue took $1.8 million from a board member of FINRA while they lobbied the Senate on a bill relevant to their industry by selling his house to her privately for above its market value. Both have a history of profiteering from their positions, in levels of corruption that should lead to criminal charges, not re-elections.
Now the longreads: The Hollywood Reporter‘s chronicle of Johnny Depp’s fall from grace is shocking in just how much Depp was the architect of his own demise.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein needs to resign if this article on her cognitive decline is even remotely accurate.
A new journal article in Science shows how fast COVID-19 spread in an unmitigated setting in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s not good.
The science supports that face coverings are saving lives during the pandemic, as this Nature article states, so why are people, like this half-witted Texas congressman, still fighting them?
A community in South Dakota that ignored the pandemic is now getting destroyed by it … and they couldn’t do more than pass a defanged mask mandate because of the idiotic opposition.
“What kind of country is this?” asked a woman looking at a lengthy food bank line in Orlando, one devastating line of many from this Washington Post look at theme park employees laid off by Disney, Universal, and other operators. Of note: Disney restored pay cuts to its senior executives just a few weeks before laying off 28,000 low-wage workers.
The scientist who came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction technique was also a serial harasser of women, making any attempts to grapple with his legacy complicated.
The Oregon Medical Board finally suspended the license of a Portland anti-vaxxer pediatrician who had thousands of patients (and whose antics I’ve highlighted here before).
What comes next for evangelicals who sold their souls to make a deal with the devil in the White House?
We need better advice than telling people not to see family at the holidays, because it’s not working.
Now we finally know who funds the Federalist. It’s the Uihleins, major conservative donors in Wisconsin who run the shipping and business supply company Uline and who contracted COVID-19 while attending a Trump party in November; and DonorsTrust, a fund that allows donors to give anonymously to conservative candidates and causes – like the $1.5 million they gave the white nationalist, anti-immigrant group VDARE.
An investigation by an independent government watchdog group found that Rep. Dan Crenshaw smeared a fellow veteran who alleged she was sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The Texas Congressman, who backed the failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to nullify the 2020 Presidential election, also refused to cooperate with the OIG’s investigation.
Florida whistleblower Rebakah Jones found herself the subject of a warrant and early-morning raid, as the state accused her of unauthorized access to an internal emergency alert system. Several legal experts have said the evidence to support the warrant was flimsy, and the warrant was the judge’s first act since he was sworn in by Gov. De Santis.
WIRED looks at the strange case of Google firing a researcher for her work on an uncontroversial paper about bias in AI algorithms.
Speaking of Florida, the Orlando Sentinel apologized for endorsing Rep. Michael Waltz, who also signed on to that abortive effort to subvert our democracy. Apparently his efforts to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive sales tax wasn’t enough reason not to endorse him before the election.
This New York Times article on Wilmington, Delaware, having a ‘moment’ because of Biden is actually pretty good except for the top photo of the Charcoal Pit, which is like a poor man’s Friendly’s.
A writer who has autism writes about the harm of Sia casting a neurotypical actor as a character with autism in her new movie.
Cris Collinsworth put his foot in his mouth by acting surprised that women might actually like and know about football, and later issued a half-assed apology.
The photos of the new underwater tunnel in the Faroe Islands are quite stunning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

I had two pieces this week for subscribers to The Athletic, one on six non-tendered players who would make my rankings of the top free agents, and another on what this week’s news of realignment and contraction in the minors might mean. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the unique new game Pendulum, which is turnless – players move simultaneously, but when and where you can move, and what you can do, is dictated by three sand timers, each of which has a different duration.

My podcast will return on Monday, with two episodes scheduled before we break for the holidays. You can also get more of me by subscribing to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: It’s the 19^th century in Kansas, where debtor’s prison is still a thing. In Coffeyville, a judge without a law degree issues bench warrants for a debt-collecting attorney who gets a cut of bail payments. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
Outside looks at plant-based imitation fish, and why it could be a game-changer for our depleted oceans.
I reviewed the new documentary The Donut King here earlier this week, and the BBC has a longread on the same man, Cambodian refugee turned donut-shop entrepreneur Ted Ngoy.
In 2018, Gatwick Airport had to close for two days after multiple people reported seeing a drone flying in its airspace. Yet a long police investigation has found no evidence any drone was ever there.
This 2018 piece from the Washington Post is a strange sort of apologia for Chevy Chase, a white man who’s said and done some lousy things, and made some bad choices, and doesn’t seem to understand why nobody wants to work with him.
Stereogum explains why an obscure Pavement song became their most-streamed track on Spotify, and how the service is trying to convince artists to take an even lower royalty rate than they already do.
One of Joe Biden’s top advisers lobbied for the 2017 GOP tax cut, which also gave a boon to MLB owners by allowing them to continue to pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage. Cynthia Hogan also lobbied for the NFL while the league was dealing with bad publicity after several domestic violence incidents, and played a pivotal role in Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991.
Anti-vax communities have proliferated on social media for years, despite the evidence harm they cause, but now they’ve become recruiting grounds for people pushing the bullshit conspiracy theory known as QAnon.
A new article published in Microbes and Infection looks at how anti-vaccine activists are courting people thirsty for information on COVID-19, identifying six specific tactics one such show has been using to convince people that the virus is a hoax and the vaccines won’t be safe.
The media needs to stop reporting on people’s intent to get (or not get) a COVID-19 vaccine, because it’s helping erode already shaky public trust.
The English rapper Digga D has to notify police any time he uploads or releases new material, potentially giving them the chance to censor him, as part of the terms of his probation for a conviction for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
The editors at the National Review called Trump’s ongoing attempts to claim widespread election fraud cost him the Presidency a “disgraceful endgame.”
Trump’s ‘vaccine czar’ Moncef Slaoui owns $10 million in stock in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the companies that has worked with the Administration’s Warp Speed effort to develop a vaccine, and refuses to sell it. The Administration’s position is that Slaoui is technically a contractor and thus isn’t bound by the same ethics rules as employees.
Jess Grose, the New York Times‘ parenting editor, writes about why most kids hate to lose and what parents can do about it.
A school superintendent in Weatherford, in North Texas, refuses to enforce a state mask mandate … and nobody is stopping him.
Mental Floss gives us the controversial history of fry bread, sometimes called Indian fry bread, a traditional food borne out of the oppression of Native Americans by white authorities.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about how an obsession with “smart politics” left the press unprepared to do its job when Donald Trump began his run for President.
Tweet of the week:

Cartoon repost. And edited. #CovidVaccine #COVID #covid19 pic.twitter.com/Fpcm8W4xKm
— Michael de Adder (@deAdder) November 29, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: biden, conspiracy theories, fish, food history, food science, kansas, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 22, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/22/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to The Athletic, about what lessons we can learn from MLB, the NBA, and the NHL (and other pro leagues) after they completed seasons during the pandemic. I spoke to numerous epidemiologists about the leagues’ approaches, from the full bubble of the NBA to MLB’s more open approach with all US-based teams playing at home, and of course the hoaxers were in the comments before the electrons were dry on the article.

Over at Vulture, I wrote about eleven board games you can play over Zoom while you can’t (or shouldn’t) see your friends and family, which seems more relevant with potential lockdowns looming in most of the country.

My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Bill Baer, talking with me about the state of baseball and what he hopes the Phillies will do with their front office openings. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, and hope to send another one before the holiday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Cal Newport, the author of the superb book Deep Work, writes in the New Yorker about the problems with personal productivity in the age of the knowledge worker. Our business world is very poorly built for the current environment of remote work and associated challenges like child care and remote schooling.
Also from the New Yorker, Shane Bauer looks at how a violent police force ruled Vallejo, California, killing residents (usually people of color) with impunity.
The Guardian describes how the Colombian army killed thousands of innocent civilians and claimed they were insurgents, a scandal known as falsos positivos (false positives) that have turned a former military hero into a villain.
Rebecca Solnit argues that Democrats should not meet those who advocate racism, misogyny, homophobia, and authoritarianism halfway. When the LA Times turned its editorial page over to letters from Trump supporters – under the disingenuous claim that we hadn’t been “listening” to those voices – Fox News and the Federalist did not and were not pressured to give time to Biden supporters.
Jezebel looks at how the online wellness community, already pushing various forms of woo, has latched on to the hoax conspiracy theory QAnon.
There’s a new study out of Denmark that deniers and other anti-mask loons have been citing as evidence that masks don’t work against COVID-19, but they’re completely – and deliberately – misinterpreting that study’s methods and conclusions. Among other things, the study didn’t even look at whether wearing a mask prevented transmission to other people, which has long been the main reason cited for mask recommendations.
Sen. David Perdue (R), fighting Jon Ossoff for re-election in a January 4^th runoff, made tens of thousands of dollars by helping a defense contractor in which he owned shares via a bill that directed Navy funds to the contractor.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is accused of multiple abuses of power, including an ongoing indictment for securities fraud charges that is now five years old, but impeachment is very rare in the Lone Star State.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State says fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, have been pressuring him to exclude legal ballots. The whole party appears to have gone down the same bottomless pit.
Christian nationalists are becoming a more important voting bloc, backing Donald Trump and Republicans in huge numbers in 2016 and 2020. My own hypothesis is that as overall religiosity continues its decades-long decline, the percentage of religious Americans who identify with these authoritarian beliefs will increase.
Trump’s foreign policy people are reportedly trying to set as many “fires” as possible so that Biden’s Administration is hamstrung the moment they take office, unable to push new initiatives because they’re trying to put those fires out.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs tweeted about death threats she and others in her office have received in the wake of this year’s election, where Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, both Democrats, won the majority of ballots in her state.
Raw Story spoke to a neuroscientist about how Americans can recover from the harm four years of Trump has caused. I think he said something along the lines of “Lock him up.”
Ian Millhiser points out just how undemocratic the United States Senate is, where a minority of the population controls a majority of seats.
LA Times food critic Patricia Escárcega tweeted about how she lost a grievance over the fact that she’s paid less than her male colleague who does the same job that she does. Both were hired in the wake of the death of their legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. UPDATE: she just tweeted another thread in response to the LA Times‘s public statements about the case.
A new marine sanctuary around the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha in the southern Atlantic will be the world’s largest.
A peer in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords referred to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris as “the Indian” in a tweet, but won’t be sanctioned for it.
Defector has the dope on Bill Simmons’s efforts to thwart the Ringer’s union, while the New York Times looks at how the Ringer is using contractors to reduce the importance of full-time employees.
Donald Clarke of The Irish Times asks why all these terrible films are being called classics, citing Hocus Pocus and The Family Stone.
McSweeney’s presents Olivia, the COVID-19 era American Girl doll.
BBC Radio 1 announced they will no longer play the original version of the Pogues’ Christmas song “Fairytale of New York,” which includes a homophobic slur.
Morrissey claims he was dropped from his record label due to “diversity,” not because he’s a racist, Islamophobic asshole.
Zach Hayes explains the case against Curt Schilling for the Hall of Fame on PitcherList.
The Chicago Public Library eliminated fines for overdue books last year, and saw missing materials return while patronage increased.
The BBC has a primer on the brewing civil war in Ethiopia, where Tigrayan and Oromian people have been at odds since the fall of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
A wrongful death lawsuit claims that managers at a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa placed bets on how many workers would contract COVID-19 after those employees were ordered to report for work even in unsafe conditions.
My former employers at Disney have been accused of withholding royalty payments to author Alan Dean Foster for books he’s written in the Star Wars universe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, colombia, coronavirus, disney, ethiopia, georgia, links, longreads, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ October 31, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/31/20.

My ranking of the top 40 free agents this offseason went up on Thursday morning for subscribers to the Athletic. I also answered some questions for Kaitlyn McGrath, our Blue Jays beat writer, on the state of the Blue Jays’ farm system.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Taylor Trammell, Mariners outfielder and author of a column on the Players Tribune called “Baseball Is Not Black Enough.” He was an outstanding guest, and I think this is one of the best interviews I’ve had, which is all to Taylor’s credit. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and now Amazon podcasts. I appeared on TSN 1040 in Vancouver on Wednesday to talk about the World Series and the role of analytics in the sport, in which I think I expressed my views on the subject pretty well.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

Here’s my weekly reminder that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life and you should buy lots of copies for everyone you know, like your Secret Santa person, or that annoying guy at work who thinks he knows everything there is to know about sportsball.

And now the links…

Longreads first: “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman.” The Vanity Fair cover story and profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is well worth reading, despite the non-troversy over what she wore in the photos.
The Washington Post explores how several companies issued six- and seven-figure bonuses to executives, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stiffing creditors and laying off thousands of employees.
The New York Times has the story of how the Wall Street Journal‘s news reporters’ debunking of their own editorial page’s claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was some big deal, concluding that Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, thus foiling the Trump campaign’s last-ditch attempt to attach a scandal to their opponent. (The “dossier” in question is fake, and the alleged author doesn’t exist.)
Also from the Grey Lady, the story of Trump’s sketchy relationship with Deutsche Bank, and his avoidance of taxes on $287 million in forgiven debts.
Amy Coney Barrett is the least experienced SCOTUS judge in 30 years – which is what the GOP wanted, since she’s likely to give them decades of loyal service.
Author Mona Eltahawy writes that Barrett is a five-star general in the army of the patriarchy.
QAnon’s predictions – like JFK Jr. coming back on October 17^th at a Trump rally – haven’t come true, so how will the movement survive this failure of prophecy?
This Washington Post investigative report found that during Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties, so I suppose he drained the swamp right into his own coffers.
Many states and countries are moving to eliminate daylight saving(s) time, in line with increasing evidence that the practice does more harm than good.
Travis Roy, the BU hockey player who broke his neck in one of his first games in college and was paralyzed from the neck down, died this week at age 45.
Philly police smashed the windows of an SUV, beat the driver, and then pulled a toddler from the backseat … and the National Fraternal Order of Police claimed that an officer had found the child wandering around barefoot.
A judge in Florida’s Duval County resigned from the county’s voting board after a local paper reported that he’d donated 12 times to Trump’s campaign and had multiple Trump signs in his yard – which the judge’s wife claimed were on “her side” of the property.
A professor at Northeastern wrote an open letter to the school’s students as the university tries to force all professors there to teach classes in person in the spring semester.
Facebook employees say the company manipulated the news that users saw to favor right-wing sites in an effort to appease Republicans.
Easter Island defeated the coronavirus without causing a deep division among its people by invoking their cultural practice of tapu, which gives us the English word taboo.
Côte d’Ivoire has its own presidential election this year, with a current president running for a third term that might not be constitutional, and a rival whose refusal to leave that same office in 2010 led to a civil war and an ongoing trial at the Hague.
A British-Australian academic has been held in Iranian prisons for two years after she was arrested while attending a conference in Tehran. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was moved from a notorious women’s prison, Qarchak, to a secretive ward elsewhere in Tehran.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced that they’re taking pre-orders for Atheneum: Mystic Library.

Please, if you are a U.S. citizen and you haven’t already done so, vote. Vote this anti-science, racist, authoritarian Administration out, so we can get back to arguing over whether Yadier Molina is a Hall of Famer instead.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, coronavirus, florida, links, longreads, police, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ October 24, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/24/20.

My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawc https://klaw.me/3ogZKgt hat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Verge has the story of how a deal with Taiwanese company Foxconn, touted by Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker, to generate jobs for Wisconsin workers went completely south and will probably not lead to any new jobs or economic development.
Remember that story a year or two ago about how U.S. agents abroad might have been attacked with some sort of sonic weapon? Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ looks at the increasing number of cases, evidence that Russia is behind it, and the CIA’s reluctance to investigate.
The New Yorker tells how Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin, has spent his year in the Cabinet working to undermine labor protections. The President of the AFL-CIO even sent Scalia a letter in April accusing the Secretary of forsaking the very mission of the department, which was created in 1913 to defend the rights of workers, job seekers, and retirees, not the employers Scalia seeks to protect.
Prevagen is a nutritional supplement – that should set off alarm bells right there – that claims it can improve your memory. The FDA has been receiving consumer complaints and notices of adverse events for over a decade, but lax regulations over the supplement market have helped the manufacturer avoid serious consequences.
Two devastating stories on the decline of local newspapers and how it may harm the towns those papers served: As local news dies out, Republican PR firms are cooking up pay-to-play faux-newspapers that look like the real thing. Meanwhile, a Floyd, Virginia, newspaper fired its only employee, leaving the paper reliant on freelance content and articles from sister publications.
Will Leitch wrote about the lessons from how baseball held its season during the pandemic, navigating early interruptions to the point where we’re about to finish the World Series.
James Wagner wrote about the WhatsApp group for women in baseball that has served as an informal support network, spearheaded by Cleveland’s life skills coordinator Jen Wolf. I’ve known Jen a long time and I am not the least bit surprised that she would be behind something like this.
Stop wiping down your groceries and focus on things that actually reduce the chances of transmission, like washing your hands.
Sinclair Broadcasting aired an interview with a white nationalist last weekend, conducted by anti-vaxxer Sharyl Atkisson.
The editorial board of the Washington Post wrote that the Trump administration kidnapped children, and we shouldn’t mince words about it.
The Atlantic‘s editorial board unequivocally endorsed Joe Biden, imploring readers to vote out Donald Trump.
Amy Coney Barrett overturned a civil court ruling in favor of a woman raped by a prison guard in Wisconsin “because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties,” and the watchdog group Accountable.US said such “unconscionable cruelty” has no place on the high court.
A professor who worked at Notre Dame says her experience as a working mother there was very different from Barrett’s. The Catholic university’s “pro-life” policies don’t extend to reasonable resources or time off for pregnant women or working mothers.
Dr. Craig Spencer was vilified by Trump in 2014 when the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian came home from working with Ebola patients in Guinea with the virus. He hit back at Trump this month over the President’s irresponsible behavior while infected with COVID-19, and called Trump’s lack of empathy “the single greatest threat to the American people.”
Scientific American debunks the myth that COVID-19 death counts are inflated.
The BBC has a useful primer on Bolivia’s presidential election.
BuzzFeed tracked down the “Dunkies” woman who went viral for her emphatic appearance on a local TV station in Boston.
Tony Lewis, lead singer and bassist for The Outfield, died suddenly this week at 62. The band’s guitarist, John Spinks, died in 2014 of cancer.
Harvardmagazine profiles Louisa Thomas of the New Yorker, who wrote that magazine’s essay on the return of baseball in a pandemic this summer.
The diabolical ironclad beetle (Nosoderma diabolicum) can withstand forces of 39,000 times its body weight, which would liquefy almost any other creature.
From late September: MediaMatters’ Matt Gertz explains how Trump rallies overwhelm media members assigned to cover them with so much bullshit that it’s impossible to discuss it all.
From 2017: The New York Review of Books has a longish piece on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Is it an undecipherable code, or just medieval nonsense?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, coronavirus, journalism, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp, white nationalism

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ October 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/4/20.

I had two pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the top 20 players under age 25 in the postseason (before the first round began), and one this morning with my hypothetical ballots for the six player awards. I also held a video Q&A for the Athletic on Friday.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games with polyomino (Tetris) tiles as part of their mechanics, which is a fairly common thing in recent games, with a huge run of them hitting the market in 2019-20.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Nick Piecoro, who covers the Diamondbacks for the Arizona Republic and a longtime friend of mine, almost since I first got into the writing side of the business. My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’ll have a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, now that I have a few more articles to include.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: In the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction for his book Say Nothing, explores the world of the modern private detective, including an anecdote of how PIs helped free Meek Mill.

By now you’ve probably seen the New York Times exposé on Donald Trump’s near-zero payment of income taxes and extensive use of questionable deductions to avoid paying. I paid more in federal income taxes in the last half of September than Trump did in all of 2017.

The USL, the country’s Division II professional men’s soccer league, had a serious issue in a game last week between Phoenix and San Diego, where a player on the former used a homophobic slur against a player on the latter. Two of my colleagues at the Athletic have the story on the incident and the fallout, where San Diego coach Landon Donovan pulled his team from the field and forfeited the match.

Also at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, exposes the real reasons Fox News fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, including harassment and creation of a hostile work environment. Guilfoyle is now one of Trump’s main surrogates on the campaign trail and a big part of his attempts to reach women voters.

BBC News shows how the oil industry has spent over thirty years working to make people doubt the existence of climate change. It’s worked, and we’ve now lost valuable time we could have spent trying to slow or stop it.

One man who continued to go out in public for eight days after he first fell ill with COVID-19 has caused a cluster by exposing dozens of other people, at least nine of whom have tested positive, in upstate New York.

A different man flouted a mask mandate at a hotel frequented by visitors to the Cleveland Clinic, as did members of his family. That man has since tested positive for COVID-19, meaning that his actions last week potentially exposed dozens of people who are in close contact with patients to the virus.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted a thread on Russian interference in the 2020 election and the executive branch’s unwillingness to investigate it.

Editors and staffers at the NYU student newspaper The Washington Square News resigned en masse to protest a hostile work environment created by their faculty adviser, Keena Griffin. Their claims include racial insensitivity and transphobic comments. Dr. Griffin is the president of the College Media Association, and the CMA has announced its own investigation.

Jonathan Last writes in The Bulwark that President Trump showed in last week’s debate that he’s a sociopath – and that 60 million Americans like him that way.

Why did the CDC soften a report on safety conditions at meatpacking facilities in April, during the early days of the pandemic?

There’s a longstanding cultural movement in the two Congolese capitals of Kinshasa (the D.R.C.) and Brazzaville (The Republic of Congo), where people of all ages dress extremely snazzily, regardless of their circumstances or where they live. This BBC photo-essay shows these sapeurs in their stylish clothes, including people who break gender norms and children who found their love of fancy outfits early in life.

It took Youtube a few days but they finally removed a video by right-wing nutjob Josh Bernstein where he said that Ilhan Omar “should be executed,” referring to her as a female dog.

I watched the Spanish-language film Monos, which was Colombia’s submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, this past week, and will write about it in the next few days. The Guardian had an interesting article from last October on how brutal the shoot was in the high-altitude jungles of southern Colombia.

McSweeney’s brings us “Hemingway writes The Baby-sitters Club,” which I appreciated more because I’ve seen the excellent adaptation of the books that debuted on Netflix this summer.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, coronavirus, detectives, food safety, links, longreads, soccer, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 19, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/19/20.

I had one post of my own this week for subscribers to The Athletic, on my disdain for MLB’s proposal to keep expanded playoffs beyond 2020. I also did a Q&A with our Royals writer Alec Lewis and answered some questions for our Nats writer Britt Ghiroli on each of those teams’ farm systems.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my friend and former colleague Adnan Virk, talking about the season to date and some upcoming movies of interest to him (he hosts his own movie podcast called Cinephile). My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the five best board game reboots I’ve played, as a companion to last week’s review of Nova Luna, itself a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The most likely way to get infected with COVID-19 is coming into airborne droplets that contain the virus – that is, breathing in what infected people breathed out. All of your Lysol wipes and closing schools/workplaces for “deep cleaning” is hygiene theater: You get COVID-19 from being in an enclosed space with someone who has it and isn’t wearing a mask.
The New York Times looks at the strange case of Ed Buck, who appears to have killed multiple gay Black men by overdosing them with meth. Buck pitched himself as a major Democratic donor in southern California, but the evidence is that he talked a big game but really wasn’t a big deal.
NPR exposes how “Big Oil” sold U.S. consumers on the lie that plastics would be recycled.
This Washington Post story highlights the dangers of medical misinformation by showing how one 26-year-old film editor fell prey to online conspiracy theories about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines. By the end of the story, he’s gone completely off the rails.
A former Facebook data scientist alleges that the company has ignored blatant manipulation by autocratic governments or other political parties, including those in Honduras, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, and says she was fired for spending time on these matters.
Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for President, the first time in the publication’s 175-year history that it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.
A second Washington Post story highlights the battles over the US Postal Service and how the Trump Administration scotched a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of masks to Americans.
Dividing athletes into male and female groups requires imposing a clear binary on a messy reality. So says David Epstein, writing for Slate on the decision to ban Castor Semenya from women’s track unless she agrees to suppress her natural testosterone production. Vonnegut called this one in “Harrison Bergeron.”
Shere Hite, a pioneering sex researcher who first rose to prominence with her 1976 book The Hite Report, which discussed female sexuality and sexual experiences, died earlier this month at 77.
Another woman has accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and his adherents do not care…
…because so many of them care only about ending a woman’s right to choose.
The group “Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden” doesn’t have any actual Democrats in it.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump cult led by Charlie Kirk, is paying teenagers to tweet disinformation on COVID-19 and mail-in voting or post similar information on Facebook. I’m not clear why those sites haven’t banned Kirk and TPUSA for running de facto troll farms.
Trump’s legal strategy to suppress the vote is continuing apace in Wisconsin and other swing states, right in plain sight of everyone who should care.
A nurse who worked at an ICE detention center alleged that women held prisoner there were being given hysterectomies without their consent. Some women who were in that camp have alleged that the nurse was complicit in those forced sterilizations.
Climate change is killing Americans and destroying our physical infrastructure, but the Republican Party says we can’t afford to try to stop it.
The UK government’s chief scientific advisor revealed that he was strongly rebuked for arguing for a stricter lockdown earlier this year.
This New England Journal of Medicine editorial advises us how to build trust in an eventual COVID-19 vaccine. Hint: It’s not by promising one will be out before the election.
Two more white women revealed (or were exposed) in the last week that they’ve been posing as Black. I feel like this is a bigger problem than the salacious coverage implies – this isn’t just a scandal, but it’s a serious case of fraud, as these women all have taken jobs or academic positions that should have gone to Black women, and thus probably slowed or derailed other women’s careers as a result of their fraud. The news coverage focuses more on the scandalous part, which leads to pointless claims about “racial dysphoria” or other nonsense, when these women are just frauds.
My friend and colleague Lindsay Adler wrote about Dak Prescott and her own experiences with depression (for subscribers to the Athletic).
The NYC bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters, which sells books about cooking, food, and drink, has a GoFundMe up to try to help them survive the pandemic’s drastic effects on their business.
There’s a fight going on within Spotify over the company’s new, exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, because of many transphobic comments he’s made over the years, and appearances by guests who engage in transgender denialism.
Board game news: Embarcadero, a 2021 game co-designed by the designer of Scoville, is on Kickstarter and already well past its modest funding goal.
Infinity Gauntlet, a new variation of the fast-playing deduction game Love Letter, is now out from Asmodee.
Dire Wolf announced the forthcoming game Dune: Imperium, an officially licensed property with art from the new movie version of Frank Herbert’s novel.
This about sums things up for 2020.

We should probably call it a night pic.twitter.com/YJbU1QGJpn
— The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) August 29, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, gender issues, links, longreads, mental health, olympics, sexual assault, social media, the swamp

→ September 12, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/12/20.

I had several posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week. One was another scouting notebook looking at several top 100 prospects who debuted recently, including Ian Anderson, Ke’Bryan Hayes, and Deivi Garcia. Another looked at what the planned changes to the 2021 draft might mean in practice. The third was a Q&A with our Red Sox beat writer Jen McCaffrey, discussing the state of Boston’s farm system. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Nova Luna, one of the nominees for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award. It’s a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats, rethemed and redesigned by Uwe Rosenberg (Patchwork, Agricola). It’s very good, and definitely good for family play with kids 8 and up.

I’ve resumed writing my email newsletter more regularly recently, helped by the resumption of the baseball season and a few other things that have made life a bit more normal. Also, here’s your reminder that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is available on bookshop.org and anywhere you buy books.

Charles Peterson, the Cardinals’ area scout in South Carolina and Georgia, has COVID-19 and is on a ventilator. You can join me in donating to his GoFundMe here … and maybe consider what it would be like to live in a country where we didn’t have to do this to pay our medical bills.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited second novel, Piranesi, comes out on Tuesday. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of the author, who has suffered from an undiagnosed malady for much of the last fifteen years that sapped her energy and led to her writing hiatus.
BuzzFeed broke the story that billionaire Peter Thiel, who contributed significant funds to Trump’s campaign in 2016 and whose company Palantir holds numerous government contracts, cultivated contacts with white nationalist groups to gain their support for Trump before the last Presidential election, even meeting with the white supremacist Kevin De Anna.
Seattle Mariners prospect Taylor Trammell wrote a powerful essay for the Players’ Tribune that says that Baseball is Not Black Enough.
The Deadspin employees who resigned en masse last October have returned as Defector, a new, subscription-only site that promises the same sort of content Deadspin provided. The sports media world certainly has missed having some sort of watchdog to cover and spread
Here’s a discussion paper (equivalent, I think, to a pre-print, and not peer reviewed) that details the spread of COVID-19 as a result of the Sturgis motorcycle rally. And here’s a review of some problems in the pre-print.
The New York Times interviewed playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, the new head of PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression and gives out numerous literary awards through its various chapters (including the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Hemingway awards).
Regardless of what your bubble on the internet told you, the government did not break up a child sex trafficking ring in Georgia.
America Can’t Take Another Four Years of This Lethal Idiot.
A New York Daily News report found that the Trump Administration stole $4 million from a fund set up to pay for FDNY firefighters and medics still dealing with ill effects from 9/11.
Science spoke to Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who testified before Congress in May and has emphasized the need for stronger measures to combat the pandemic.
Two-thirds of the world’s wildlife vanished in the last fifty years due to human activity.
Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former Sheriff of Maricopa County , is on Cameo, so a furry convention hired him to welcome them to Arizona – and he did it because he didn’t know what a furry was.
This meme seems like it will be useful forever:

pic.twitter.com/WY362C4r2I
— Ireland Simpsons Fans (@iresimpsonsfans) September 10, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, biodiversity, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

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