vaccines — Page 3

→ June 28, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/28/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a scouting notebook on Jesus Made, Luis Peña, Trey Yesavage, and some Orioles and Brewers low-A prospects, and a post on the 2025 draft prospects who might be the first to reach the majors.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Conservas, a solitaire push-your-luck game that brings environmental sustainability into its victory conditions.

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The fast-fashion craze is a huge drain on the planet’s resources, although this Scientific American feature also examines some entrepreneurs fighting to make clothing more sustainable.

In the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen examines the enormous cost we’re about to face from rising vaccine denialism (or “skepticism”).

The New York Times tells the stories of people caught up in measles outbreaks from Texas to North Dakota, all preventable, all the result of scam artists and lunatics spreading lies about vaccines.

Kate Shemirani was a nurse in Britain who lost her license for spreading false information about COVID-19. Her anti-medicine insanity ran so deep that her 23-year-old daughter just died of a treatable cancer because her mother opposed her getting chemotherapy. Shemirani’s two sons blame their mother and are urging social media sites to crack down on misinformation.

Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about the cowardice of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who voted to confirm RFK, Jr., knowing full well what the noted anti-vaccine crank would do as head of the HHS.

A presentation for this week’s meeting of CDC vaccine “advisers” cited a study on thimerosal in vaccines and autism that does not exist. (There is no link between thimerosal and autism.)

Vanity Fair profiles Iowa state Rep. J.D. Scholten (D), who is running to unseat Sen. Joni “We all die some day!” Ernst (R) while also pitching for the independent Sioux Falls Explorers.

Haaretz spoke to IDF soldiers who say they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians trying to get food and other aid.

The University of Florida’s law school gave an award to a paper written white-nationalist student in which he argued that Constitutional rights only apply to white Americans.

Harvard hired a researcher to examine the school’s historical ties to slavery … but when he found too many, they fired him.

Everything is bad – it’s just as terrible as you imagined and probably worse – but a three-judge panel struck down a Louisiana law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Your religion is yours; don’t force it on me or my kids or anyone but your own.

Your energy bill may be going up because of the AI bubble as energy companies rush to build more infrastructure to support these greedy tech companies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R, of course) refused $450 million in federal funds that would have provided food to school-aged children over the summer. Just like Jesus intended.

Roll20-owned site DriveThruRPG, a major store to download new and classic role-playing games, removed a game called Rebel Scum from its catalog because the anti-fascist game is “too political.”

I really hesitate to share anything made by AI, but this satirical newscast is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, louisiana, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ June 7, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/7/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote about three prospects who’ve really seen their stock rise this year and three who’ve seen theirs fall as a follow-up to last week’s top 50 ranking. I also wrote a news story (which I think is free to read) on Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter using a homophobic slur during a game, and his weak apology after he got caught on camera. And I held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Zenith, an outstanding new two-player game where you fight your opponent for control of five planets, playing cards from your hand to three different areas to try to pull planets your way. You win by getting the same planet to your end of the table three times, or four different planets to your side, or five planets in any combination at all.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, my third in four weeks, which for me constitutes some sort of hot streak.

I appeared on Marty Caswell’s Youtube channel to talk about the Padres’ farm system, potential trades if they stay in the race, and what to do with Xander Bogaerts; and on 92.3 the Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana and Cleveland’s struggling offense.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This undated story on the main suspect in the Tylenol poisonings and how he slipped through multiple murder investigations is the best thing I read all week. At least part of the basis of a new Netflix documentary series, this story is at least two years old, as James Lewis, the suspect in that case and at least one other murder, died in July 2023.

Federal and Texas state law enforcement officers arrested 47 people at a house party, claiming they were members of a gang called Tren de Aragua. Months later, they’ve found and offered no evidence of any gang connections, according to a Texas Tribune investigation.

The AP reports on how Trump’s slashing of public health budgets is destroying our national infrastructure of preventative health services, which will cost us billions more in lost lives and years while further eroding trust in those same authorities.

Oklahoma Republicans passed a law allowing parents to opt their children out of any class subjects they believe to be “harmful.” Rational-minded parents there are now using the law to withdraw their kids from classes pushing election conspiracy theories and Christian theology. If you live in Oklahoma, the form you can use is here.

WIRED has the story of a study on the keto diet and arterial plaque that keto proponents claim validates their position – but one of the study’s authors left the project and has called for its retraction, due to conflicts of interest and shoddy work. There’s an underlying theme here on how peer review can break down and how bad actors are increasingly trying to exploit the academic-research system.

“Israeli gunfire” targeted Gazan civilians outside an aid distribution center, according to the Red Cross. The Guardian had a later update that raised the death toll to over 30. Israel first denied anything happened, then denied firing at civilians, then later admitted to firing “warning shots.”

The Trump Administration has ended an NIH program that was working towards a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – a program that also had potential in many other areas, including possible therapies for autoimmune disorders.

NBC News interviewed several families who are leaving the U.S. because of the increasingly anti-transgender climate. I’ve assumed we’ll see, or even already are seeing, migration out of red states for LGBTQ+ families because of hate laws passed there, but adding this to the brain drain from the Administration’s war on academia is going to further erode our economic position for decades to come.

Indeed, even in red states where voters have passed progressive ballot initiatives on subjects like abortion and cannabis, Republican lawmakers are trying to subvert the will of the voters, usually in the name of religion.

MIT banned one of its scheduled student speakers from graduation because she gave a pro-Palestinian speech the day before.

The GENIUS Act looks like it will prioritize crypto holders over depositors if a bank becomes insolvent.

The New York Times reports on WelcomeFest, a gathering of so-called “centrist” Democrats who are mad that we’re all yelling at them online. The story notes on politicians taking shots at Indivisible, an important voter mobilization group with hard-left ideas like “don’t cut aid to the poor.” These people are only centrist if you ignore how much the Overton window has lurched to the right in the last decade.

Talking Heads enlisted director Mike Mills (the C’mon C’mon guy, not the REM bassist) to film a music video for “Psycho Killer,” starring Saoirse Ronan. It’s excellent, and Ronan is both hilarious and unsettlingly weird in it.

The Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games has a new crowdfunding campaign up for Battle of the Divas, a two-player game that casts the players as Maria Callas and Renata Tibaldi, fighting to be the greatest singer of their era.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, gaza, links, longreads, nutrition, oklahoma, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, true crime, vaccines

→ May 24, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/24/25.

My first Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft, is now up for subscribers to The Athletic; I held a Q&A on Thursday to take questions about it and other prospects. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook from my recent looks at Andrew Painter, George Lombard, Jr., Jhostynxon “The Password” Garcia, Mikey Romero, and others.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Diatoms, which has some incredible art and high-quality components, and almost plays too quickly – I wanted a few more rounds to keep building patterns.

I’ve now sent out two issues of my free email newsletter in the last two weeks, which I think counts as a streak.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read this month is this San Francisco Chronicle story by their food critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, about her experience eating at The French Laundry and how chef-owner Thomas Keller treated her. It is nuanced, thoughtful, and ultimately allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an extensive investigative report on the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against journalist Wesley Lowery.

The Guardian has an excerpt from the new book that their reporter Dom Phillips was writing when he was murdered, along with indigenous Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira. The two were investigating the illicit destruction of the Amazonian rain forest and the threat to indigenous peoples in the region. The book, How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers, will come out on May 27^th.
The New Republic has the full story of the state-sponsored executions of four American nuns in El Salvador in 1980. The Reagan Administration, by the way, kept gaslighting the public by claiming the nuns were secretly communist sympathizers or activists. Today they’d just claim the nuns were MS-13.

AI’s energy consumption is completely out of control, surpassing cryptocurrency mining and massively increasing carbon emissions from big tech firms.

Trump tried to stop Harvard from taking in any students from outside the U.S., and Harvard sued and immediately got a temporary injunction. Do not comply in advance.

A man shot and killed two Israeli diplomatic staff near the Jewish Museum in DC in an apparent act of terrorism. He later shouted “Free Palestine” after his arrest. Reuters has more on the victims and the suspect.

The Administration is trying to intimidate progressives in Congress with the charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver. Progressives need to stand up and fight for her, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.
The vaccine denialists running the FDA are saying they won’t approve COVID boosters for healthy people under 65, despite all of the evidence showing those are effective and no evidence showing they’re not safe.

Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal stumbled on a technique used in Europe to help facilitate communication between pilots on commercial flights and prevent accidents … but it’s not used in the U.S.

Matthew Cherry won an Academy Award for his short film Hair Love, which then turned into a book and an animated series on HBO Max. He’s now working on a new short film, an animated musical project called Time Signature, and has a Kickstarter up for it.

An unusual genetic mutation explains the coloring of orange cats, but it doesn’t explain why they are completely bonkers.

My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, reviewed a new video game called Despelote that is about sports but not specifically a sports video game. It sounds fascinating.

Two new boardgame Kickstarters this week: Tangerine Games has one for Sauros, a dinosaur-themed trick-taking and tile-laying game.

Board & Dice, which specializes in heavy Eurogames, has one for a new edition of Trismegistus, which is very highly rated on BGG but also has a game weight rating of 4.18/5.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, brazil, climate change, harvard, israel, links, longreads, metoo, movies, restaurants, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 17, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/17/25.

I had one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, a minor league scouting notebook on some Yankees, Nats, Rays, and Orioles prospects; it’s rained just about every day since then, so I haven’t been to a game since Sunday (despite trying, twice, only to have the games cancelled after I was at or nearly at the park).

I did finally send out a new issue of my free email newsletter this past week, and I’m going to try to get back to doing that weekly now that my spring travel appears to be done. I think I ended up in 15 different states this spring, seeing over 70 guys who are legitimate draft prospects along the way, and of course I’m still annoyed at a few I missed (like Gavin Kilen, who was hurt the weekend I went to Knoxville).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Trump Administration pressured African countries to give more business to Elon Musk, according to this report from ProPublica. All of the other stuff is a distraction – all of the funding cuts, the hate laws, the executive orders are there to suck up the oxygen so we don’t notice that they’re using the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. Like with this Amtrak project that Musk’s Boring Company is probably going to “win.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s attempt to take over the Copyright Office flopped because of opposition from conservative media companies and content creators, who, as it turns out, do have some principles when it comes to protecting their own bottom lines.
A preprint that appeared last fall that claimed that materials scientists who had access to AI tools were substantially more productive – and that received publicity from credulous reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere – was almost certainly a complete fabrication. MIT issued a press release this week saying they had “no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper” and that the author, former graduate student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was no longer affiliated with the school. The link above argues that the paper was full of red flags, including impossible access to corporate data and too-good-to-be-true results.
Alex Shephard says in the New Republic that Trump is the most corrupt President the U.S. has ever seen.
Political scientists who study the decline of democracies say that the United States is sliding towards autocracy in the way that other previously-free countries like Hungary and Turkey have done in the last twenty years.

A pharmacist at Oak Valley Health in the Toronto area turned out to be one of the people behind the now-shuttered MrDeepFakes.com, one of the biggest sites for nonconsensual pornography. May he never know another moment of peace.

Another tick-borne disease is on the rise in the U.S., including the mid-Atlantic. Babeosis mimics malaria symptoms and is carried by the same species of tick that spreads Lyme disease.

Moderna’s combination COVID and flu shot outperformed current vaccines against both viruses in trials. Will the denialist in charge of HHS stop its distribution in the United States?

Doctors at CHoP & Penn Medicine used gene therapy to cure a newborn of a rare, often fatal metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency. It’s the first successful application of a new type of gene-editing protocol that could save thousands of lives if it can be adapted for broader use.

Bad headline, good story: Scientists are trying to figure out why the universe didn’t annihilate itself due to the interaction between matter and anti-matter in the moments right after the Big Bang. If it had, though, maybe we wouldn’t be keeping a dead woman on life support to comply with a theocratic abortion law.

A prison guard in New York admitted that he cleaned up the blood after his colleagues beat inmate Robert Brooks to death. This week was the first I’d even heard about the story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: frauds, health, links, longreads, medicine, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ May 3, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)

Elon Musk’s xAI is operating 35 gas turbines in Tennessee with no permits for all pollution they’re spewing into the air. AI is an environmental disaster as it is, but Musk using his dubious position in Washington to skip any and all regulations is making the problem worse.

The author/owner of Recipe Tin Eats wrote about how influencer and cookbook author Brooki Bellamy copied several of her recipes, and those of other recipe sites, in Bellamy’s best-selling new book. Nagi refers to it as plagiarism, which is probably inapt, but Bellamy at least appears to have swiped the recipes and very slightly reworded the instructions to avoid copyright claims.

A group of religious zealots called My God Votes are trying to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy (they have lots of help, unfortunately), positively pissing on any notion of the separation of church and state in this country.

And Texas is also threatening to go after bookstores that sell whatever it is that the religious right deems “obscene,” allowing a minor to claim damages from such books.

As Trump and Musk ignore Congress by eliminating federal funding and firing workers, Trump’s golf trips are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. I thought these guys wanted to eliminate government waste. I just found a whole lot of it. Yet food banks across the United States are running desperately short now that Trump/Musk have cut off funding and supplies.

ICE agents raided a house in Oklahoma City … but they had the wrong place. Instead they traumatized a mother and three daughters who had just moved there from Maryland when twenty armed agents broke down the door and seized the family’s computers, phones, and cash. The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that people who were called crazy for saying we should abolish ICE were right all along.

AI-generated slop sites are proliferating across the internet; Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré writes about one such site that used an old domain associated with Emerson College’s radio station to appear legitimate while churning out fake ‘news’ stories.

Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.

Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).

The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.

And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.

The NIH has rolled out new rules that prohibit grants to anyone working on programs related to diversity, equity, or inclusion. Like so many other executive orders and federal mandates of the last four months, it’s probably not legal, but it won’t matter. They’ve already caused the chaos they sought.

A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).

Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, crime, cryptocurrencies, first amendment, immigration, links, longreads, math, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ April 26, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.

Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.

The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.

Trump has also deported at least two U.S. citizen children with cancer. This appears to be on top of the illegal deportation of a two-year-old girl, also a citizen, with “no meaningful process” in the words of a federal judge in Louisiana.

It looks like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may have misappropriated public funds, moving $10 million earmarked for … into his personal campaign fund.

A former Tesla engineer says that when she pointed out a safety issue with the breaks in the company’s cars, Elon Musk threatened to deport members of her team.

Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.

The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.

A group of scientists have banded together to form the Vaccine Integrity Project with the goal of countering vaccine misinformation coming from our own federal government. It comes as the Administration replaced the official site for information on COVID-19 with a page promoting the debunked lab-leak theory of its origins.

Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.

The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.

Two German backpackers were handcuffed, held in dirty holding cells, and deported from Hawai’i because customs officers thought they were sneaking into the U.S. to work. Travel into the U.S. from overseas is tumbling. I’m not clear how cutting the billions foreign tourists spend here is supposed to help our economy.

In a largely symbolic move, two Delaware legislators, including my representative Krista Griffith (D), introduced a bill to inhibit local attempts to ban books from school or public libraries.

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to this Times story about the massive monthly board game night in NYC hosted by Richard Ye, which topped 500 people in March.

Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.

Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, delaware, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ April 19, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.

NPR spoke to a dozen Zambians living with HIV whose access to life-saving medications has been cut off by Trump/Musk’s illegal decision to close USAID’s clinics there. Ending this aid is killing people around the world, and those lives are not somehow worth less than American lives.

A Mormon therapist who claimed to be able to help gay members of the LDS church has been sentenced to prison for sexually abusing those patients over a 15-year period. No drag queens were involved in the case.

GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior, is mounting a run for Mayor of New York City, and two labor unions just endorsed him despite that history. Eric Adams has been a fiasco, and Cuomo might be worse. New York state taxpayers have spent over $60 million on legal fees for Cuomo since the allegations began.

The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.

Gazans arrested by occupying Israeli forces spoke to the BBC about how Israeli forces tortured them while in detention.

Israel killed a Palestinian photojournalist and her entire family in a targeted strike on their home, weeks before a documentary that features her and her work is set to premiere at Cannes.

A man attempted to kill Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) by setting fire to the Governor’s home, claiming he was doing it because of Shapiro’s support for Israel. The man’s family says they tried to have him committed in the days before the attack as his behavior became extremely erratic.

U.S. immigration officers detained an attorney who is representing a student who has been charged for participating in a pro-Palestine protest while he was returning from a family vacation.

Good people in Tennessee formed a human chain to protect one of their neighbors from an ICE attempt to detain the man despite the lack of any warrant.

The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.

Immunologists Daniel Altmann & Angela Rasmussen wrote in Nature on how scientists need to respond to the existential threat against global health and science.

Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.

In the New Republic, Parker Molloy wrote about how mainstream media outlets downplayed the mass protests of April 5^th.

My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where my daughter received excellent care multiple times when we lived there and once while we were visiting, folded like a cheap suit and will no longer provide gender-affirming care to trans kids after threats from Trump.

The Mississippi Library Commission deleted two research collections to try to comply with the state’s anti-diversity laws, continuing Mississippi’s steady march back to the 19^th century.

RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.

Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are trying to get the Supreme Court to bring “don’t say gay” to public classrooms across the country.

A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.

Put your phone in airplane mode when they tell you too, by the way. It’s not just the law, but it’s better for the pilots and for your phone.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, gaza, harvard, lgbt rights, links, longreads, media criticism, mississippi, new york, pennsylvania, phoenix, Sports, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 22, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.

The Guardian’s long read explains how an extremist, bigoted rabbi who died over 30 years ago holds sway over leaders at the top of the Israeli government.

M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.

One more – The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last rants about how it was never about trans women in sports, and how we should just leave trans people alone.

A 6-year-old girl died of the measles in Texas, because her parents are part of a religious cult that has largely rejected vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement has pounced and is using the death to further press their own dangerous bullshit.

Columbia University bent the knee to President Trump over $400 million in funding. Their endowment, by the way, is about $15 billion. This is an active choice, not a financial necessity.

Prof. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor of bioethics at Columbia, coincidentally, wrote an editorial for Nature calling on scientists to stand up against the war on DEI.

Three prominent conservatives were arrested just this past week for child sex crimes. The issue is not trans people. It was never trans people. Here’s more on the Minnesota Republican, who spoke out against teaching kids about sexual orientation and gender identity back in 2016. (It’s not limited to right-wingers, though; a Democratic party official in Florida was arrested a few weeks back for the same.)

The Mississippi Free Press reports on deaths and injuries resulting from no-knock raids in that state.

Dark energy might be weakening, challenging cosmologists’ understanding of the way it works and threatening the standard model of the universe.

SpaceX’s Starship ships keep blowing up – and it will never work because of Elon Musk, according to journalist Will Lockett.

I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.

From my colleague Carson Kessler: MLB may be ending its Diversity Pipeline Program to try to comply in advance with the new Administration’s anti-DEI crusade.

A math problem known as the Kakeya Conjecture has been solved after 117 years.

Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, israel, links, longreads, mississippi, physics, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the most comprehensive look so far at the “digital coup” being staged by Elon Musk and his DOGE toadies.

A doctor at Brown Medicine went to Lebanon to visit her family, and on her return, she was – and still is being – held at Logan Airport for deportation.

The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett spoke to the Mennonite father whose six-year-old daughter died of the vaccine-preventable disease known as the measles.

A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.

Two professors at my alma mater argued in The Harvard Crimson that it is time for the university to stand up against the Trump regime, and then wrote a similar piece on Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s continued silence.

More Harvard news: former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke at Harvard Business School and joked that he’d give pagers to people protesting the war on Gaza, a reference to the Israeli government’s murder of several dozen people in Lebanon via exploding pagers.

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) deliberately misgendered my Representative, Sarah McBride (D-DE), leading her to refer to him as “Madam Chair” and for ranking Democrat Bill Keating (MA) to actually stand up for her, something Democrats have barely bothered to do since Republicans started their attacks on her.

Robert Morris, a megachurch pastor in Texas who was a “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child. He was a major force behind Texas’s bill banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms, arguing that it would – get the irony – protect children from sexual abuse.

Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.

Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.

A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.

Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.

Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, fascism, harvard, links, longreads, seattle, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines

→ March 9, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.

Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.

Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.

The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.

Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.

More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.

Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.

I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.

The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.

Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.

People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.

A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.

Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10^th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coffee, Economics, first amendment, idaho, links, louisiana, mississippi, new york, phoenix, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

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