vaccines — Page 22

→ January 21, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/21/17.

My annual prospect ranking package started to appear on ESPN.com this week for Insiders, with the farm system rankings coming in three separate parts: teams ranked 1 to 10, teams ranked 11 to 20, and teams ranked (sad trombone) 21 to 30. I held a Klawchat here on Friday, after all three parts were posted.

The top 100 itself will roll out over five days this upcoming week, 100 to 81 on Monday and 20 to 1 on Friday. I will probably chat Friday afternoon again so that you have the whole list available to you before I take your questions.

Over at Paste I reviewed the really adorable boardgame Kodama: The Tree Spirits, a great family game with a new mechanic that almost feels a little artistic.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter, where, I kid you not, someone actually told me “you should stick to baseball” in response to the last edition, because apparently I can’t talk about whatever I want to talk about in my own fucking newsletter

Gah. The links:

Man Boasts Of Sexual Assault, Later Inaugurated 45th President Of United States. Not The Onion.
Journalists covering President Trump are in for a hellish experience, one where he’ll abuse and attack reporters whose coverage he dislikes, and where he’ll simply lie his way past serious questions. Best of luck. We’re all counting on you, so no pressure.
The New York Times interviewed numerous women who voted for Donald Trump. The answers are all different, yet all horrifying – the rationalization, the economic ignorance, the invocations of the paradox of tolerance, and so on. Yet the message is fairly clear – the Democratic Party did not do a good job convincing enough voters that Trump’s policies were harmful. Either they didn’t have the right messaging, or they didn’t reach enough people, or both. But we can’t blame voters – even when they say dumb things – for not voting the way we wanted them to.
I’m writing this as the global Women’s Marches are ongoing, and enjoyed seeing that even a small group of visitors to Antarctica are participating.
A reader of mine wrote this humorous op ed on why Trump’s vaccine-denialist pandering angers even nice doctors.
Longread: The Atlantic looks at Iceland has curbed substance abuse among teenagers. Quick summary – it’s complicated, and it involves parents stepping up their efforts.
A long-running lawsuit against Cargill and Nestle over turning a blind eye to child slave labor on African chocolate plantations may finally get its day in court, and if this does nothing more than scare large chocolate manufacturers into ensuring their suppliers don’t use slaves, that would be a positive outcome.
Actress and activist Ashley Judd gave a TED talk in October about online misogyny, and within it argued video game developers must wipe misogyny from their games and that all tech companies must fight sexism in the workplace. (The entire TED talk is embedded in both articles.)
Everyone seemed to mock Betsy DeVos’ answer to the question about guns in schools during her confirmation hearing, but did that cause the reporting to miss just how crazy and/or unprepared she was?
Speaking of Ms. DeVos, in this 2014 piece Jeb “Mobute” Lund looked at the 15 worst owners in sports, including the DeVos family, who own the Orlando Magic.
A reader sent along this link on how research into turmeric’s medicinal properties was a waste of time, because the molecules within it (curcumin) that show anti-inflammatory properties on their own don’t do so within the body.
Shake Shack has pledged to source all its chicken according to higher animal welfare standards … by 2024. I understand these things take time, so overnight promises are worthles, but seven years for a company that doesn’t even sell that much chicken? Within the piece, however, it says all the eggs they use are now from chickens raised cage-free, so at least they have a history of meeting such goals.
I wrote my thoughts on season 4 of Sherlock earlier in the week, but EW interviewed showrunner Stephen Moffatt about the season and the finale as well, and he offered some truly cringeworthy comments on the Molly sequence in that last episode.
The national soccer team from Timor-Leste was kicked out of the Asian Cup for using Brazilian players with fake documents.
I love a good strategy boardgame, but this five-hour, £175 game now on Kickstarter is beyond my tolerance for the genre.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, chocolate, food science, links, rape culture, sherlock, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/14/17.

I’ve been writing Top 100 stuff (and making related phone calls) all week, so the only content I wrote that didn’t appear here on the dish was my review of the boardgame DOOM, an adaptation of the 1990s first-person shooter video game and an update of an earlier attempt to make a boardgame of it.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The Guardian says turning Sherlock into James Bond is unacceptable, and I largely agree – this season’s first two episodes had too much action and gunplay and not enough Sherlockian deduction.
Also, if you’ve seen the Sherlock season opener, the showrunners spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the surprise ending and their vision for the series.
The Internet of Things leaves us all vulnerable to hackers in ways we don’t expect, like controlling cars remotely via malware or over wireless networks.
Let’s talk vaccines. The Director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center wrote a garbage, anti-vaccine editorial on Cleveland.com that brought up the discreted vaccine-autism link. Why is anyone surprised, given the Cleveland Clinic’s embrace of other forms of woo like naturopathy?
Donald Trump met with noted vaccine-denier RFK Jr., who is batshit insane on this topic, and conservative writer Ben Shapiro gave us eleven reasons why Trump is wrong to buy into this crap.
Seth Mnookin looks at how RFK Jr. “distorted” vaccine science, although I’d call it flat-out lying.
What can the vaccine-denial movement teach us about improving the public’s science literacy? Unfortunately, one of the author’s conclusions is that denialists manipulate parents with appeals to emotion like making it a “freedom of choice” issue, whereas scientists tend to avoid such irrational efforts.
What’s behind the 2016 spike in mumps cases? One response might be to get a third dose of the MMR vaccine, as the mumps component may gradually lose effectiveness over 10-15 years.
The Ringer looked at noted vaccine-denialist and all-around quack Dr. Joseph Mercola, who makes over $10 million a year from his so-called “alternative health” sites.
Mercola’s site has “4,400 articles on the benefits of turmeric.” Too bad research on the benefits of turmeric (specifically curcumin) keeps coming up empty.
This notice to parents from an Alabama pediatrics office is absolute pro-vaccine gold.
WIRED has an oral history of the making of the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America, which seems likely to get least get a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims he invented e-mail and files nuisance lawsuits against sites that dispute this, is now suing Techdirt for the same thing, a lawsuit that could put the site out of business. He’s backed by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who also backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Ars Technica has a little more detail on the suit, and on why Ayyadurai is wrong. Lots of folks responded to my tweet about this by saying, in essence, that Gawker got what it deserved, but 1) that’s irrelevant to this case and 2) Gawker only posted the Hogan video after a federal court ruled it was newsworthy, making the results of Hogan’s lawsuit hard to explain.
Derrick Goold wrote about a novel type of elbow surgery that may bring Seth Maness back to the big leagues in about half the time it would have taken after Tommy John (ligament transplant) surgery. Maness’s tear was in the right location, near an attachment point, and the ligament was otherwise in good enough shape that he qualified for the new procedure.
Rye bread – I mean real rye bread, the dark, nutty stuff, made with whole-grain rye or even rye berries, is making a comeback. It’s a lower-gluten relative of wheat, so breads made primarily or wholly with rye flour tend to be denser than wheat breads, but I think rye has a more interesting, complex taste than commercial whole wheat flours.
I figure most of you have seen this, but just in case, GQ had a great longread on the diaries of a HS football player who killed himself after suffering from concussion-related CTE. He left detailed instructions for his parents to spread the story of what football did to his brain. It’s a wrenching read, and I wish someone would wallpaper Roger Goodell’s office with it.
Have you seen those cheesy infomercials for MyPillow? Well, the owner may have broken the law with his neverending “buy one get one free” promotion, which also cost the company its BBB rating. It’s kind of a story of the owner’s arrogance, figuring that if something works for his business it must be OK.
Princeton Professor Cornel West reflects on what he calls the sad legacy of President Obama. It’s worth reading, but the essence is that the practical results of Obama’s policies were not progressive enough for his supporters on the left.
There’s real hope for the first time in the forty years since the island’s division that Cyprus could be reunited via a tripartite peace deal, although Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan later dismissed the possibility of a full Turkish troop withdrawal from the divided island. (Given the history of both the Turkish and Greek governments in Cyprus, I kind of don’t blame him.)
Climate change is causing China’s largest desert to expand at an alarming rate, displacing people and turning thousands of acres uninhabitable.
With climate-change denial the official policy of the President-Elect and the party that controls both houses of congress, a new group is trying to recruit scientists to run for office so that we get some rational thinking in our government.
A North Korean boy who was abandoned by his parents and lived on the streets of Pyongyang shared his story with the BBC, including his eventual escape to South Korea.
Russia’s parliament moved to decriminalize domestic violence this week.
And now, to the outhouse … The Trump-Russia connection became more sordid and problematic this week, as the BBC’s award-winning Paul Wood explains in a measured piece that doesn’t quite go as far as BuzzFeed did in revealing the documents.
Charles Pierce explains how no one knows what comes next. He compares Trump to Captain Ahab, but I think he’s more Captain Queeg.
Trump’s plan to name his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a key advisory post is his first attempt to ignore the law, specifically a 1967 law that prohibits this sort of nepotism. My fear isn’t that he’ll do it, but that no one will challenge it.
Betsy DeVos, a creationist nutjob who gave a lot of money to the GOP and coincidentally has been nominated to be our next Secretary of Education, conveniently “forgot” a $125,000 donation she made to support an anti-union ballot measure in Michigan.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bread, climate change, links, sherlock, vaccines

→ January 7, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/7/17.

I’ve been working on the top 100 prospects package, which begins a three-week rollout on January 18th, since New Year’s, so I didn’t write anything for Insider this week. My boardgame reviews continue, with a review of the Celtic-themed game Inis for Paste and a review of the boardgame and new iOS app for Colt Express here on the dish. I did hold my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Several former Justice Department lawyers penned an op ed claiming that Jeff Sessions is lying about his involvement in civil rights cases. They say, “Sessions knows that his real record on race and civil rights is harmful to his chances for confirmation. So he has made up a fake one.” In a rational world, that would end his nomination for Attorney General.
Venezuela’s ongoing political and economic meltdown may lead to a recall of president/dictator Nicolas Maduro, but he appointed a successor this week in new Vice President Tarek el Aissami, who is (or was) under investigating by U.S. authorities for drug trafficking.
Author Ryan Holiday wrote an insightful, somewhat angry piece on the ‘online diversity police’, folks who immediately decry the lack of diversity on any list or grouping (often inaccurately, as it turns out).
Lindy West wrote one of the week’s best, most important essays, on why she left Twitter after six years on the service, citing the endless abuse and the rise of neo-Naziism.
The Daily Beast exposed the long con of 55-year-old “millennial” comedian Dan Nainan, who tries to pass himself off as 35 and has fooled several media outlets as such.
Esquire has a longread on former Deadspin and Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio, whose career was derailed by the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit.
Grierson & Leitch each posted their top ten films of 2016, along with a 100-minute podcast where they reveal their lists to each other and discuss them. As usual, Leitch’s list comprises fairly well-known films, while Grierson’s has several films I’ve heard of and three that may not actually exist.
The eight-year-old transgender boy kicked out of a New Jersey Cub Scouts group after other parents complained talked to the Jersey Journal, as did his mother, about what happened, in a piece that also explores the psychiatric community’s evolving understanding of “gender dysphoria.”
Jill Saward’s death didn’t garner much coverage here either, but she was an important figure in the movement for sexual assault victims’ rights, as the first British rape victim to waive her right to anonymity and publicly discuss her case.
Will Trump’s election mark the return of civil disobedience? So far it has, but can the various movements opposed to the Republicans’ reactionary agenda keep it up for four or more years?
Let’s talk about the Russian hacking operation, which a US intelligence report says Putin ‘ordered’ to get Trump elected. David Remnick weighed in as well.
The Seattle Times called out Trump’s “reckless linkage” of vaccines to autism, desperate overwhelming evidence that there is no link.
Lauren Duca of Teen Vogue has quickly become one of the most important voices in political journalism, thanks to pieces like this one about the family selling access to the President-Elect at a party at Trumo’s Mar-a-Lago resort that made over $420K.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman headed up the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, but she said she fears for the planet under a Trump regime for many reasons, including his denial of climate change.
The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel outlines the Republican Party’s plan for a “sweeping conservative agenda” now that they control the White House and both houses of Congress. I’d dispute the word “conservative” here, though; this is very much an agenda written by and for white Americans, especially Christians, but doesn’t bear much resemblance to the traditional economic and libertarian-minded conservatism of Reagan or Buckley.
The political crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn’t gotten much attention here amidst our own, but President Kabila hasn’t signed the agreement to end his rule, which has been marked primarily by his looting of the country’s coffers of millions of dollars.
Finally, the Huffington Post made news of nothing with a piece on Mark Zuckerberg apparently becoming an ex-atheist. I’m linking this for one major reason – my disdain for the need to classify people by their religious beliefs, something I first encountered on Wikipedia maybe a decade ago, where articles on people can be categorized by the subject’s religion. You can change your religious beliefs on a dime; you can lie about them (in many countries, you may have to); you can fail to fit in any neat bucket of beliefs. As a general rule, I don’t think your religion is any of my business unless you wish to make it so, so I particularly dislike the idea that you need to know what someone believes or, as in this case, that a possible change in the beliefs of a famous person are somehow newsworthy. I’ll be happier when Zuckerberg’s beliefs include extirpating fake news sites from Facebook.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, frauds, links, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 24, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/24/16.

For Insiders this week, I wrote up Cleveland’s deal with Edwin Encarnacion and the Clay Buchholz trade, as well as a piece last Saturday on some potential problems in the new CBA. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My first-ever piece for Vulture ran this week, a holiday gift guide to boardgames for gamers at various levels (including newbies to the hobby).

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The most important piece I read this week came from Michael Shermer, author and editor of Skeptic, who wrote about how to convince someone who refuses to accept facts. I think his core point – that people who reject, say, evolution or climate change are doing so because it challenges their worldview, especially religious ones – is entirely valid, but he doesn’t tell us what to do when the President-Elect and his entire Party appear unwilling to accept facts.
The Indianapolis Star has a lengthy investigative piece on how a child-molesting gymnastics coach continued working with kids for 20 years, working in a dozen gyms across four states before he was finally arrested and charged … and the parents of kids in that last gym came to his defense before he confessed. It’s a story of our failure to believe victims, of fear of liability, and of passing the buck instead of standing up to stop a dangerous predator.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail ran a two-part series on how drugmakers happily poured opiates into West Virginia despite evidence that there was an epidemic of addiction in the state. It’s a simple story of greed, corruption, and a stunning lack of empathy for the victims.
Deadspin’s The Concourse has a great piece on how technology isn’t going to turn Saudi Arabia around. The core message here, I think, is something I’ve believed for twenty years: the Saudis are not our friends, and the foreign policy of both parties and every Administration for the last forty years isn’t helping us or the Saudi people.
White supremacists led by Richard Spencer are causing hell in Whitefish, Montana, including targeting a local business owned by a non-Jewish family with a “Jewish-sounding” name.
Twitter trolls have a new tactic – sending seizure-inducing images to people with epilepsy, such as journalist Kurt Eichenwald.
Tucker Carlson gets called a “partisan hack” – rightly so – when he tries to shame a journalist for doing her job, and doing it well.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, who was one of the more moderate candidates for the Republican nomination (by comparison), signed bills this week allowing concealed carry in day-care centers and blocking local minimum wage laws.
I feel like everyone saw this, but it was one of the most entertaining things I saw all week: Many people remember a movie called Shazaam, starring Sinbad, that doesn’t actually exist.
Paul Krugman’s NY Times piece on how republics end was widely shared this week, seen primarily as a commentary on the Trump regime (which in some level it was), but he specifically cites the cut block executed by Republicans in North Carolina, which is rapidly becoming one of the nation’s biggest backwaters, heading down same path as Kansas.
The Kuwaiti embassy appears to have moved a major event to the Trump Hotel in DC to curry favor after members of the Trump team pressured them to do so. This is not normal.
Trump’s sons were caught earlier in the week using a Texas non-profit to sell access to the President-Elect in echange for million-dollar donations. His sons now won’t attend a particular fundraiser that raised these suspicions, but the connection is still there.
Trump’s national security adviser met with the head of Austria’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party, founded by ex-Nazis in the wake of World War II. This also is not normal.
The ACLU explains one possible workaround to the Electoral College problem, although I doubt there’s any movement on this front until Democrats control more state legislatures.
Why has Pakistan jailed a Christian woman on dubious blasphemy charges for five years? Like the Saudi government, the Pakistani government is not our ally, not if they use our desire to work with them against the Taleban as air cover for persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims.
Quartz reviews a new type of neurological study (they call it “brain health,” which seems facile) that somewhat predicts future criminal behavior for toddlers. The headline is clickbait; they’re saying that toddlers who score low in this type of test are more likely to engage in criminal behavior as adults. That’s a correlation, not a full-on prediction and not definitive by any means. But it raises no end of ethical and policy questions, not least of which is whether we should test all kids to identify those at risk so that they get early intervention, but with the likelihood that they’ll be tagged for life as such?
A junk study in Japan that claimed to have found a link between the HPV vaccine and certain adverse events has prompted demands for the journal to retract the paper.
I love The Muppet Christmas Carol, and now my daughter does too, so it’s an annual tradition for us to watch it. Mental floss had one of its trivia posts on fifteen odd facts about the film, including why the famous “When Love is Gone” scene is rarely found on home video releases.
Great piece from Indy Star writer Gregg Doyel on Grayson Allen’s behavior and the need for real, personal change, based on Doyel’s own experiences.
A football player in Idaho walked free on sodomy charges despite assaulting a teammate with a wire hanger, enough to cause internal tearing. The player was white, the victim black and developmentally disabled. The player won’t even have to register as a sex offender because the prosecutor didn’t think it was warranted. I see this stuff and, you know what, maybe we should just split the country in two, because if you think this shit is okay, then maybe we shouldn’t be in the same nation.
I thought Moonlight was outstanding, and the BBC wrote about how the film is making an unlikely romp through major critics’ awards, despite being a low-budget independent film about a black, gay male character at three stages of his life.
A South African cafe is making Nespresso capsules of one of the world’s most expensive coffees, which are catching on as the market of people who want the convenience of pod coffee is spawning a segment that wants coffee that doesn’t taste like swill. That’s great, except pods are an environmental nightmare, creating way more trash than other methods, which typically produce entirely compostable output (like pour-over).
Physicists managed to hit antimatter particles with a laser, the first time such an experiment has succeeded – mostly because antimatter doesn’t last very long in the presence of matter. One of the mysteries of our universe is how we ended up with more matter than antimatter during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, which is why anything exists in the universe today.
The livestock industry keeps talking about reducing antibiotic use, but it’s not happening, at least not yet.
“Thank God Nigel Farage has the courage to take a stand against whining do-gooder Brendan Cox,” writes Independent columnist Mark Steel, taking aim at the Brexit Muppet’s attacks on the widower of British MP Jo Cox.
Science fiction has offered its share of dystopian futures, several appearing to predict the rise of a Trump-like fascist leader, including an Octavia Butler story that had such a character promising to “make America great again.”
I’ve been to Bermuda three times but never knew why their roofs are shaped as they are, with stair-like patterns. It’s because the island has no real source of fresh water, and the roofs allow for more efficient collection of rainwater. The piece also talks about Bermuda’s culture of water conservation and how tourism and increasing population density threaten it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bermuda, drugs, food safety, links, neo-nazis, post-truth, vaccines

→ December 17, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/17/16.

My main piece for Insiders this week went up this morning, on the many lost opportunities in MLB’s new collective bargaining agreement, discussing money and rights the union may have left on the table, and why the agreement seemed to come together so late. I also wrote about the Dodgers’ two re-signings earlier in the week, and I held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

At Paste this week I ranked the ten best boardgames I saw in 2016. A few folks have asked why the highly-rated Scythe isn’t on the list; I think that game is too long and overly complicated, with playing times that can top two hours (and a retail price of $90). All ten games I listed are clearly better, in my opinion.

In case you missed it, my list of my 100 favorite songs of 2016 went up here on Wednesday night.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

“Never again” died at Srebrenica twenty years ago, so let’s not be surprised that the world is standing by, wringing its hands over a preventable massacre in Aleppo.
My favorite article this week was by the great food writer Harold McGee, on how our brain’s perception of food shapes how we think it tastes.
North Carolina Republicans have executed a brazen power grab after losing the gubernatorial election. The Election Law Blog had more details on the coup d’etat earlier this week. I said this on Twitter, but again, if you live in NC and your reps are Republicans, you should be calling their offices every day to express your displeasure at this subversion of the democratic process.
A difficult but important longread from Jess Luther, author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape, on the ongoing struggle of a ballerina and sexual assault survivor.
In a subscriber-only article (that somehow showed up in full for me last week), the Wall Street Journal‘s economics commentator Greg Ip argues that our economy is stalled by a lack of “big ideas,” technological advances that would both create jobs and raise the overall standard of living.
The Genetic Literacy Project discusses differing opposition to two similar programs of sterile insect release, one of screwworms made sterile by irradiation, and one of Aedis aegypti mosquitos made sterile by genetic modification. The reason for the difference is, at heart, science-ignorance.
The great Hugh Acheson is one of four chefs who weigh in on how the election affects their businesses and employees, since undocumented immigrants make up a huge portion of the restaurant workforce. Acheson’s big point is worth remembering – if we have a sphere of control, like a small business to run, then we make sure the people within it are taken care of.
It’s not a well-written piece, but the argument in this Japan Times editorial is a worthy one: if the CIA has hard evidence of Russian involvement in our election, they need to reveal it now, rather than leaking insinuations that are only creating controversy without informing anyone about the underlying facts. Here’s a perfunctory review of the accusations that Putin personally directed the use of hacked information. You’ll notice I’m not calling for anyone to do anything (e.g., Trump electors to vote for Clinton) because I really don’t know what to make of all this.
If you use Chrome, you can install the new extension from the Washington Post that tags Trump tweets with explanations of whether they’re false.
Philadelphia Eagles lineman Brandon Brooks spoke openly about his struggle with anxiety, which caused him to miss several games this year.
Are chiropractors backing the vaccine-denial movement? Is this a surprise to anyone? I’ve been to chiropractors for back and neck problems, and of the half-dozen I’ve seen, five have tried to dispense irrelevant and/or incorrect medical advice, like claiming gluten was the source of my other ailments or questioning the safety and efficacy of the flu shot. So-called “chiropractic medicine” is a magnet for quackery. These are perfect bedfellows.
Should states ban teens from tanning beds? It might save lives and money.
This Economist review of a forthcoming book delves into how and why sugar is our biggest dietary health risk.
The American College of Pediatricians’ name has been in the news a bit lately, and you should remember that they’re a hate group that targets LGBTQ youth with bullshit press releases and letters that misquote doctors and scientists.
The potential appointment of Betsy DeVos, who did much to destroy public education in Michigan, as our national Secretary of Education is a bad sign for the separation of church and state, especially regarding our secular, public schools.
A combination of active practice and passive study is best for learning languages, according to a pair of studies described in this Scientific American piece.
This list of ten things an author can do in a depressing global environment is actually good advice for readers too. Shorter version: Support good writing with your purse and your mouth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, food science, Languages, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 3, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/3/16.

I had a couple of Insider pieces this week, on the trade of Jaime Garcia to Atlanta, the Cespedes contract, the trade of Alex Jackson to Atlanta, and my proposal for an international draft (written before the CBA negotiations ended). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers Grifters, a “deckbuilder without a deck” that I thought played a little too mechanically.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

An important longread from Scientific American: How factory farming is speeding antibiotic resistance, endangering animals and humans alike, while the government does virtually nothing to stop them. The best thing we can all do is buy only meat from animals raised without antibiotics – organic is not necessary for this but it does qualify – or just don’t eat meat. The article also details some of the oppressive conditions in the ‘contract growing’ business of raising animals for food.
Another longread, this time from the Guardian, on Italy’s “ultras,” dangerous gangs of soccer fans who exert unusual control over the sport and are behind much of the violence that surrounds the sport.
I linked to this on Twitter earlier in the week: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote about the disastrous policies of Henry Kissinger in Southeast Asia, which led to millions of civilian and military deaths.
The House Science Committee is notoriously hostile to real science, something that became apparent again this week when its official account tweeted a link to a climate-denial article at a neo-Nazi site.
The FTC finally did something good! They’re requiring so-called “homeopathic medicines” to include a label that says there’s no evidence they work. That’s because they can’t work. Homeopathy, like cupping and acupressure, is just woo.
The Kansas government of Governor Sam Brownback has been an economic disaster, but it’s also been a test tube for voter-suppression tactics, like requiring proof that voters are Americans, even though the state could only identify three non-citizens who voted in the ten years before the law in question was passed.
A junk study claiming a link between vaccines and autism has been pulled following heavy criticism. I doubt that’ll stop deniers from using it, though.
And those same looney-toons think that Donald Trump will be an ally for their cause. Given his actions so far as President-Elect, I think he’ll throw them overboard the moment it’s politically expedient.
A federal judge ruled that counties in Hawai’i can’t ban genetically modified crops because state law prohibits counties from legislating agricultural issues. It’s painted as a win for Big Ag, but it’s also a win for science.
Research by the Pew Center finds that Americans don’t understand the meaning or import of organic or GMO food. Organic food is not more healthful to your body than conventionally-grown food, although it may be better for the soil, and GM food is not less healthful or more dangerous than non-GM food.
Why are some Massachusetts district attorneys refusing to reveal lists of cases they’ve prosecuted, in violation of state public records laws? The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team is suing to get those records opened. Real journalism still exists, and I think it will matter in the next four years more than it has in decades.
The Daily Beast has a piece on Casey Affleck’s disturbing history of alleged harassment of women, including abusive behavior.
This Washington Post feature on the effort by the San Bernadino terrorists’ siblings to adopt the killers’ infant daughter is heartbreaking.
Rising ocean temperatures resulted in the worst bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef on record. Increasing carbon sequestration in the oceans raises the water temperature and lowers its pH. Both are bad for coral.
I loved the short-lived animated TV series The Critic, especially its crazy movie parodies, so I was thrilled to read this UPROXX conversation with the two creators.
News outlets are belatedly telling their writers not to use the term “alt-right” any longer, because it’s a euphemism for white nationalist, white supremacist, or neo-Nazi.
Another white-nationalist type has started a blacklist website devoted to identifying left-wing college professors, and Emory University Professor George Yancy is having none of it.
Miami Herald writer Armando Seguero absolutely lights up Colin Kaepernick for wearing a Fidel Castro shirt in a column published hours before the brutal, repressive Cuban dictator’s death was announced.
Many folks weighed in on Joe Posnanski’s columns about the WAR discrepancy between Justin Verlander and Rick Porcello; I particularly enjoyed Phil Birnbaum’s explanation of why the Baseball-Reference approach makes sense. You should read Birnbaum’s post, but in essence, he says that we should deduce from Verlander’s performance that he was the beneficiary of help from his defense, even though Detroit’s defense on the whole was not good.
Is the Internet a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia or now Libya? This Guardian op ed argues that the increasing lawlessness online makes it so.
Bloomberg View/Gadfly executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien argues that Donald Trump’s business is not too big to sell, and the President-Elect needs to sell before he takes office.
Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services is a member of a fringe, far-right, anti-science doctors’ group whose positions include opposition to mandatory vaccinations, opposition to abortion, opposition to stem cell research, and opposition to organ donations, and whose journal is “a repository for quackery.”
The Columbia Journalism Review profiles the overhaul and success of the Washington Post in a wide-ranging conversation with two of the digital media company’s leaders – although I think some of what they reveal is less flattering than they think.
Baltimore is attacking street violence by treating it as a public-health problem, not as a typical crime.
Let’s get to the Trump stuff: One potential pick to head NIH is opposed to stem-cell research and faces much opposition even within Republican circles.
His pick for Secretary of Education is a blow to our nation’s science health. She’s also a disaster for church-state separation, proposing more school-choice programs to allow parents to send kids to religious schools using government dollars, and with ties to the ‘intelligent design’ pseudoscience movement.
Reince Preibus confirmed that Trump’s default position on climate change is denial.
That Carrier deal? It shows Trump and Pence don’t understand the constant churn of jobs in our modern economy.
The NY Times editorial board published a blunt column on Trump’s flag-burning tweet saying Mr. Trump, meet the Constitution.
After Trump won the election, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a (symbolic) resolution saying they would oppose much of what he and the GOP stand for. Of course, it’ll matter when they act, or take the feds to court, but I wish more local politicians were so vocal about their opposition.
From June, a great New Yorker piece on just what a colossal scam Trump University was.
Here are a few of the Senate Democrats who’ve spoken out against Trump so far.
A Texas town’s mayor and government just learned it has had an independent housing authority for the last 40 years, which means that department, which had two employees, has had essentially zero oversight and, of course, hasn’t been fulfilling its mission to maintain living conditions in public housing.
The BBC spoke to hyperglots, speakers of many languages, about how they learned and retained so many tongues and why some people seem better able to do so.
A Canadian town’s police department has threatened to force people arrested for driving drunk to listen to Nickelback.
A 19-year-old Guatemalan woman with Down Syndrome has started a clothing line for other women with the genetic disorder.
Tweet of the week:

Quick recap: the new ed secretary is anti-public schools, the new HUD sec'y is anti-Fair Housing, and the new AG is anti-Voting Rights Act.

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 28, 2016

But to that, you can add that the new HHS head is anti-science, and the potential Secretary of State is still on probation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, climate change, food safety, Languages, links, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 26, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/26/16.

Chris Crawford and I ranked and wrote up the top 30 prospects for the 2017 draft, with Vandy outfielder Jeren Kendall at #1. I also wrote posts for Insiders on the Segura/Walker trade, on the Brett Cecil & Andrew Cashner contracts and other moves, and on the Astros’ moves last week. I also held a Klawchat on Tuesday, in advance of the holiday.

Over at Paste I reviewed the new Martin Wallace game Via Nebula, a great, family-level route-building game that we found simple to learn and quick to play.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Some great longreads this week, including this New Republic piece on the ten-year odyssey to identify an amnesiac man.
Another one comes from Bleacher Report, on Aly Dia, who played one infamous game for Southampton FC and has long been suspected of deceiving club officials about his experience to get that spot.
One from VICE, a report exploring the connection between the drug Propecia and serious neurological side effects, with some patients committing suicide after taking the hair-restoration medicine.
And the BBC explores how British police let a serial killer slip through their fingers, likely because the victims were young gay men with drugs in their systems.
In “depressed rural Kentucky,” residents are worrying about Medicaid cutbacks under the GOP-dominated government. Trump carried Kentucky with nearly double Clinton’s vote total, and five of their six Representatives are Republican, with the lone exception coming from the district around Louisville.
Democrat Roy Cooper continues to lead the vote count in North Carolina’s gubernatorial election, but Roy McCrory and Republicans are trying to steal it. If you live in NC, call your state reps, regardless of party, and make sure they know you oppose any attempt to subvert the results of the state’s popular vote.
A Boston Globe op ed urges Washington to get out of regulating organic food, in essence because there’s no clear defintion of “organic.” I’m about 90% in agreement here, but I do think consumers deserve the protection of truth in labeling laws, regardless of which agency is in charge of it.
London has become a leader in cutting food waste via apps that connect people with extra food – restaurants or even individuals – with people and charities who need it.
Chef Tom Colicchio talked to Mother Jones about food policy, hunger, and the incoming GOP government.
An 18-year-old college student in Tennessee has been charged with shooting and murdering his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend while she slept, because she’d ended their relationship. I’m surprised the story hasn’t gotten more coverage – pretty white girl gets killed equals headlines – but perhaps no one wants to ask 1) why he had access to a gun and 2) what this says about our male privilege problem.
SNL Weekend Update anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost have come under fire for some tasteless (and unfunny) jokes about gender identity, and Paste‘s Seth Simons says they should be replaced.
NASA’s notorious paper on the EM Drive has finally been published, and claims that the propulsion system – which appears to break Newton’s Third Law – actually works.
Scientific American wrote in the wake of Trump’s election that he’s as anti-science a President as we could possibly have. Money quote: “A mandate is what you can get away with.”
Jeb Lund (aka Mobute) has a great piece at Esquire on surviving Thanksgiving by actually going out of your comfort zone and talking to people who maybe don’t see the world the way you do.
Dementia rates in the U.S. are dropping as the country ages but researchers don’t understand why.
Why did many Canadian writers, including the ostensible feminist Margaret Atwood, speak out in support of a professor fired for sexual harassment and bullying? You can find more details on the case and the backlash in the Toronto Star.
FBI data show a rise in hate crimes against Muslims and Jews in 2016.
Slate argues that Facebook’s problem runs deeper than fake news, which is that Facebook itself is a media company but Mark Zuckerberg won’t admit or accept it.
Journalist and writer Farai Chideya has a long, thoughtful, somewhat rambling essay on this year’s “call to whiteness,” those who answered the call, and those who chose not to speak out against it.
Trump won because college-educated whites supported him. Ultimately, that is the question Democrats will have to answer: why they couldn’t capture a segment of the electorate that tends to be more liberal (higher education correlates with more liberal/progressive political views).
Trump reportedly pledged support to vaccine denialists at an event in August, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
He also once asked a reporter if it was wrong to be more attracted to his 13-year-old daughter than to his wife, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
This Philly Daily News op ed explains how Trump & Co. will distract America while looting the country and breaking all manner of rules, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
Trump continues to piss and moan about press coverage of him, including personally dressing down several reporters in a meeting last week, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet. But at least New York Times columnist Charles Blow called him out on it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: food waste, links, organic agriculture, physics, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 20, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/20/16.

I spent the last week on vacation with my family, in the Bahamas, which was lovely due to the weather, the friendly people, and the rum. Before I left, I filed four offseason buyers’ guides, to the markets for starting pitchers, relief pitchers, infielders & catchers, and outfielders. I also participated in a ’roundtable’ piece with Dan Szymborski where we discussed our NL ROY ballots.

I reviewed the family boardgame Legendary Inventors for Paste; it’s cute but feels a bit unfinished given the imbalance across the various scoring methods. Earlier this month, I updated my all-time favorite boardgame rankings, which now runs to 100 titles.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

A Tribe Called Quest dropped its final album, We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service last Friday, and the New York Times has the definitive backstory on the album, which came about due to a thaw in the long estrangement between Q-Tip and Phife, only to have the latter pass away due to complications from diabetes in March.
We can’t let the bullies win. That’s psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who won the 2016 John Maddox Prize for her defense of science against denialists, but it could apply to any aspect of our public discourse on climate change, evolution, vaccines, or, now, civil rights.
Fear of science drove opposition to a plan to release genetically modified mosquitos in the Florida Keys, but the plan is going ahead to try to prevent a Zika outbreak there. This isn’t straight science denial, but ignorance and fear, and it comes with the same arguments about unknown and unstated “risks” that simply aren’t consistent with an understanding of the technology at play here.
The murder of three elderly nuns in Burundi touched off an ongoing political crisis that has led to over 300,000 refugees fleeing the country, the President violating the constitution, and his government killing the son and son-in-law of the country’s leading human rights figure, who survived an assassination attempt himself. The global community, meanwhile, does nothing but watch, as we did twenty years ago.
If you live in North Carolina, it appears that the state Republican Party is trying to steal the gubernatorial election, even though the state was already among the biggest offenders in enacting voter-suppression tactics.
With food allergies still on the rise, there’s a rise in startups providing products that try to detect hidden allergens in food.
Vaccination refusals are up in Texas, a state that is rapidly becoming a gigantic experiment in rolling back civilization by a hundred years, and parents of at-risk kids are asking why. The answer is simple: End non-medical exemptions. In Delaware, I worked with my state rep to make it harder to get a so-called religious exemption, and philosophical exemptions were already prohibited.
If you’re wondering why I’m saying this about Texas, a state rep there has introduced a bill to ban local ordinances that protect LGBTQ residents from discrimination, along with the usual “bathroom privacy” bullshit (again, I ask, which bathroom should intersex people use?). If you live in Texas, call your state reps and tell them you oppose this bill, which business leaders in Texas have said could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues.
A hospital staffer in the UK came down with whooping cough (pertussis) and may have exposed newborns to the virus.
Pertussis can kill an infant, and they’re typically not vaccinated against it until they’re two months old.
A British woman who ended up comatose due to a flu infection in 2014 and nearly died is now urging others not to skip the flu vaccination as she did that year.
The proposed new head of the EPA under Donald Trump has called climate change ‘nothing to worry about’ and has called the Paris climate agreement ‘potentially a disaster for humankind.’
The attempts to intimidate and silence the Theranos whistleblower would be disturbing enough if they didn’t include his own grandfather, Theranos board member and former Secretary of State George Shultz.
Twitter has booted a few of the most virulent white-supremacist and alt-right figures on the service, including white nationalist (and UVA alum!) Richard Spencer. The Ringer has a piece arguing that the move means Twitter has finally started to follow its stated policies on hate speech.
A researcher programmed bot accounts to fight racism on twitter and found that they were somewhat effective … especially when the bot appeared to be a white male with a few hundred followers (as opposed to one or two).
Facebook’s fake news problem isn’t really the main reason the site reinforces false beliefs; it’s a more fundamental issue with how we receive and process such information. In other words, we seek out what we want to hear, and we believe what we want to believe.
Speaking of fake news sites, if you use Chrome, here’s a browser extension to let you know if you’re visiting one.
The American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan praised Trump’s hiring of Stephen Bannon as his “chief strategist,” in case you’re still kidding yourself about the direction of this cabal.
“We need to talk about the online radicalisation of young, white men” was the best headline of the week, and also touches on a very real concern for anyone who, say, views women as actual people.
Donald Trump’s tax plan strongly resembles the tax plan that has bankrupted Kansas. The Fed recently ranked Kansas last among all 50 states for employment growth, unemployment rate, and wage growth. This is the type of economic thinking – thunking? – we’ve now given the reins of our federal government.
Salmonella bacteria and other pathogens that cause food poisoning thrive in packaged salad bags. One solution is to just not buy these bags in the first place, but if you don’t have a better alternative, avoid bags where any leaves have started to turn mushy and dark green, avoid bags that appear tight and swollen (indicating bacterial growth that’s producing gases that expand the bag), and wash and pick over the leaves when you open the bag.
United Airlines is establishing a new lower class of service to make air travel more insufferable than usual. I’m a dedicated and happy Southwest customer and frequent flier, in large part because they don’t do this stuff.
Pete Wells gave a very positive review to a Japanese ramen/noodle-shop chain’s first outpost in the U.S.. He praised TsuruTonTan Udon Noodle Brasserie’s noodle dishes but says rather plainly to avoid their other offerings.
Deadspin suggests that we boo Mike Pence whenever possible. I find the right’s claims that the audience’s actions at Hamilton disrespectful absolutely ludicrous, given how the President-Elect publicly mocked a disabled reporter during the campaign.
Oxford English Dictionaries named post-truth its word of the year.
The agony and the irony: Mike Pence fighting a lawsuit, trying to keep his emails private. The plaintiff is trying to find out how much Pence cost Indiana taxpayers when he joined other states in a 2014 lawsuit against the Obama administration over an order to defer the deportation of some illegal immigrants.
Investing in infrastructure was one of the few aspects of Trump’s vague platform that I could support, but Paul Krugman argues its proposed implementation appears to be a financial scam, and won’t focus on the kinds of public works we need – which, unfortunately, don’t generate revenues.
The Federal Election Commission declined to investigate a dark-money group that spent all its funds on an election, even though it claims to be a social-welfare charity. At this point, we might as well shut the FEC down completely.
Area Man Considers Self Ally To Women Unless They Threaten His Status In Literally Any Way.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, denialism, gmo, japanese cuisine, links, ramen, rap, vaccines

→ November 5, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/5/16.

My big news this week was the formal announcement of my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, which will be released in April of 2017. I have gotten many requests from readers over the years for a recommendation of a book to let them get up to speed on ‘new’ stats, and since the book on that topic didn’t exist, I decided to try to write it. You can pre-order it via amazon and other sites already; it will be out in hardcover and as an e-book, but Harper Collins has not decided on an audio version yet. I also do not yet know what appearances I’ll be making or if there will be any sort of tour.

I held my regular Klawchat on Friday this past week, and my latest boardgame review for Paste covers the Hanabi-like deduction game Beyond Baker Street, where you can’t see the cards in your own hand and must give clues to other players on what cards they hold.

My email newsletter has now passed 2500 subscribers; thank you to everyone who’s already signed up. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

And now, the links…

The LA Times has an outstanding investigative piece on alleged corruption in the development of an LA apartment complex. Congresswoman Janice Hahn, a Democrat from LA, took $200,000 in “donations” from people connected to the project, many of which appear to have been submitted under different names to skirt individual donation limits.
If you care in the least about American democracy, you should be outraged over ongoing voter suppression – especially of the black vote in states like North Carolina.
And, again, if you care in the least about our democracy and don’t want to see the GOP follow through on its promise to block any Hillary nominees for the Supreme Court vacancy, well, get out and vote to give Democrats control of the Senate. If the Republicans lose enough power, they will have to change their message (and pick a better candidate next time).
Top Chef alum Kwame Onwuachi’s new DC restaurant, Shaw Bijou, has garnered mediocre reviews for its $185 tasting menu, a price that doesn’t include wine pairings, tax, or tip, which can bring the total to $500 per person.
An Alberta judge ruled that a four-year-old boy who insists that he’s a girl cannot wear girls’ clothes, part of an ongoing custody battle where the child’s father refuses to even consider that his child is transgender. The risk of suicide or other self-harm in this case is through the roof and the judge’s actions are indefensible.
The New York Times ran a lengthy piece saying GM crops don’t deliver promised results, but the American Council on Science and Health immediately called bullshit on the article.
Deadspin has another fascinating longread this week, this time on con artist and self-styled foreign policy “expert” Robert Caruso, who’s scammed his way into numerous TV appearances and writing gigs, including one for the Council on Foreign Relations.
If you want to fight climate change, stopping deforestation is an essential step and probably the easiest large-scale move we can make to reduce global warming and ocean acidification. Some advocates have gotten pledges from major food manufacturers to help, but do these pledges actually mean or do anything?
Two states have major energy/climate change-related ballot questions this year. Washington is proposing a carbon emissions tax, while Florida has a tricky question pushed by traditional utilities that would make solar panels less cost-effective for homeowners.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a measles complication that is nearly always fatal and occurs up to ten years after infection, may be more common than we thought. Imagine watching your nine-year-old kid get something akin to ALS or multiple systems atrophy. The only way to prevent it is to not get measles in the first place, which means vaccination.
Meanwhile, a bunch of deranged parents in southern California are trying to cure their autistic kids with bleach. The scam artists peddling this crap claim to be part of a “church,” and they’re under investigation in Texas as well for selling what is essentially bleach as a miracle cure.
Alton Brown is bringing back Good Eats as an online show, although the title may change and he says the format will allow him to do some things he couldn’t do on TV for legal reasons. (Maybe that means using lye in the pretzel-cooking water?)
I mentioned those “Around the Web” ads in chat this week, and they were already on my mind because of this article explaining how some publishers are moving away from them anyway. They’re all clickbait, never really tied to the article I’m reading or any data that might indicate my real interests, and often the images used with them are disturbing or provocative (like a pic of Jose Fernandez) just to get you to click.
A 24-year-old Saudi Arabian student at the University of Wisconsin-Stout was beaten to death by an unidentified white man this past week. The suspect remains at large. While it’s not known if this was specifically a hate crime, the circumstances and timing point that way.
Liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz writes that the Southern Poverty Law Center is wrong to label him “anti-Muslim,” pointing out that critics of Islam often say that the religion needs people to try to reform the religion from within and stop Islamist fundamentalism. The SPLC’s listing on Nawaz calls into doubt some of his motivations and details of his background, but also called him “anti-Muslim” for publishing a cartoon depicting Jesus and Mohammed.
The downfall of South Korean President Park Geun-hye is totally bonkers, tied to a forty-year connection with the daughter of a cult leader.
Land reclamation is increasingly popular as small city-states like Singapore and Monaco try to find more space for their people, or wealthy nations like Dubai (in the UAE) try to … do whatever it is they’re doing, but there are substantial environmental costs to these projects.
In response to an ongoing sexual harassment scandal, where male soccer players were writing and emailing sexually-charged “scouting reports” on female soccer recruits, Harvard did the right thing and canceled the rest of the men’s soccer season. Several of the women targeted in one of those documents wrote a powerful, indignant response to the men who objectified and degraded them.
Hillary Clinton faces intense animosity, often expressed in vulgar terms as she approaches the election. While some of it is clearly connected to her actions, much of it is about her husband and even more is because she’s a woman.
All right, let’s do this… The NY Times details how Trump used a legally “dubious” method to avoid paying taxes for so many years. Newsweek explains how his companies destroyed emails and documents in defiance of court orders. If you question Hillary’s ethics, how could you possibly think more of Trump?
Thomas Friedman points out that Trump’s stated policy goals will hurt, not help, his core voters. If you vote for him, you’re probably going to end up worse off economically if he wins. (I think we’ll all end up worse off as our economy contracts, but his base, less-educated white male voters, seem especially likely to suffer.) A Vox piece from a few weeks ago reached the same conclusion about Trump’s tax plans, which favor the highest-income bracket.
David Frum makes the conservative case for voting for Hillary, and against Trump, who is in no way a classical conservative. I disagree with Frum on one key point: I think as President, Trump would have plenty of help in trying to silence opposing media.
Ross Douthat points out the dangers of a Trump victory, from civil unrest (which we may see even if he loses) to global destabilization.
Prof. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, who wrote a book on Hitler’s use of propaganda, compares Trump’s use of the same to Hitler’s and claims to find similarities.
The Guardian has a piece arguing the real reveal in the Podesta emails is how the American power elite protects and helps itself by retaining power. Whether you’re voting for Hillary (as I am) or not, the emails should disturb you for their demonstration of how money and back-room deals subvert the ostensibly open nature of our republic. Esquire details how Russia pulled off this hack, the biggest in U.S. election history (so far).
From May, Adam Gopnik’s excellent and prescient New Yorker piece on the dangerous acceptance of Donald Trump.
Scientific American, which does not normally take stands on political races, has pointed out several times that Trump’s lack of respect for and ignorance of science is alarming. That piece is from September 1st, but I think if anything he’s shown the issue is worse than we thought at the time, given his increasingly distant relationship with the truth.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter lays waste to Trump, whom he’s known for over twenty years.
Because we all need some levity right now, here’s a hilarious BBC video of a clever honey badger who is a master escape artist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gmo, good eats, links, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines

→ October 29, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/29/16.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, a World Series preview, although I also spent some time working on the upcoming free agents ranking. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, my latest boardgame review covers Arcane Academy, a wizard-themed game that isn’t aimed at kids specifically but that I think is a much better game for young players than for adults.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, which now shows the correct cover. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Let’s start with the longreads of the week. This Deadspin profile of the late sportswriter Jennifer Frey, a former wunderkind who died this February of long-term alcohol abuse, is on the very short list of the best things I’ve read all year.
Annie Apple, a domestic abuse survivor and mother of a NY Giants player, wrote an emotional piece on why she couldn’t stay silent about Josh Brown.
Harvard magazine covers the quiet fight to end the death penalty in the United States. Californians will vote on whether to keep the death penalty next month.
The Washingtonian looks at how Donald Trump’s comments on Mexicans cost his new DC hotel its main two celebrity chef tenants.
Sid Meier’s Civilization was one of my favorite videogames ever; I spent a good chunk of the fall of 1992 playing it whenever I had time to spare and even when I didn’t. Author Kanishk Tharoor looks back at the game’s impact and its flaws.
Author Emily St. John, who wrote the wonderful, haunting novel Station Eleven, wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight on the rise of books with “girl” in the title, which looks more generally at how books are named and marketed.
The members of the hip-hop duo Black Sheep look back at the making of their debut album, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Here they come, yo.
The NY Times‘ op ed page looks at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s habit of overreaching on regulatory issues.
Drugmaker Purdue, which is coming under substantial scrutiny lately for its role in pushing oxycontin, helped stop regulations in West Virginia that would have limited prescriptions. West Virginia has been hit particularly hard by the ongoing epidemic of opioid addictions and overdoses, as Last Week Tonight covered in a recent episode.
ESPN ran a great piece by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a member of the Blackfeet Reservation, on what the debate over the Cleveland baseball mascot misses.
Researchers at Harvard are a new method to search for new antibiotics, building molecules called macrolides from the ground up and then testing them against a spectrum of bacteria to look for the most effective candidates.
SCOTUS agreed to review a case from Virginia on a school that wants to prevent a transgender boy from using the boys’ bathroom. The school’s policy isn’t protecting anyone’s rights, only restricting the plaintiff’s. Also, as I’ve said before, these policies and laws that refer to someone’s sex at birth ignore the existence of intersex people.
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory believe they’ve found conditions where the Second Law of Thermodynamics may break down at a microscopic level – that is, where entropy may temporarily decrease in violation of that law. I’m sure Lisa Simpson would be relieved to hear this.
Fellow Trader Joes fans may enjoy this BBC video on the Canadian store Pirate Joes and the mild-manner man who runs it by smuggling Trader Joes items he purchases in Washington back across the border to sell at huge markups.
The emails, the emails, what what the emails … Kurt Eichenwald provides some clarity on what a non-issue yesterday’s FBI letter was, while Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution offers a memo to the press on what the letter does and doesn’t mean, including the most reasonable defense of FBI director Comey’s actions I’ve seen.
If you want to know what Trump’s economic proposals might do to the U.S. economy, look no further than Kansas, where the economic news is so bad the state isn’t reporting it.
More video from the BBC, this time on Trump’s appeal in Ohio, straight from his supporters’ mouths.
The BBC has also been running a series on online blackmail using sexual images in conservative parts of the world from the Middle East to south Asia, including a video that reenacts the story of a woman jailed in Tunisia for killing the man who raped her repeatedly.
The implosion of Chris Christie has gone largely unnoticed during the Presidential campaign, but for a one-time rising star within the Republican party, it’s been a swift and ugly fall from grace.
Why are rainbow sprinkles suddenly everywhere? I think it’s an odd thing to feel nostalgic over, since they don’t exactly have any taste.
Is a vaccine for the common cold finally within reach? I hate being sick like everyone, but I feel like this is a real First World Problem. There are illnesses that kill people in the developing world that should take priority over the sniffles.
The Saudi Arabian attack on Yemen has caused an enormous humanitarian disaster, including mass starvation. Those are our “friends” the Saudis, you know.
Canada has been holding a 23-year-old native Canadian man without trial, in solitary confinement, for over four years. Under UN definitions, he has been tortured. He was finally moved to a new cell this week after public criticism, but how did this happen in the first place?
NPR looks at whether a 20-something male should still consider getting the HPV vaccine. The short answer is yes.
NPR also has a useful guide to buying and using winter squash. I didn’t know that certain types are better at different points in the winter.
Brazil and Colombia are releasing populations of mosquitos infected with a bacterium that may slow the spread of Zika and dengue.
Paste has a review of a new D&D manual, which I include here because the book is written as if it’s from the perspective of the character Volo. Fellow Baldur’s Gate fans may remember Volo as a sort of amusing ass who kept showing up and telling you stuff you already knew, or just making shit up as he went along.
Finally, Funny or Die has a message for would-be protest voters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: death penalty, links, rap, rpgs, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

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