vaccines — Page 5

→ October 21, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, anti-semitism, arizona, Armenia, board game news, environment, first amendment, iowa, israel, links, longreads, math, minnesota, nebraska, palestine, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wyoming

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ August 26, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 12, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/12/23.

I’m back, in more ways than one – I took some PTO right after the deadline to go to Gen Con, get some downtime, and just generally focus on myself for once. I’ll be back at work on Monday, although my next article probably won’t run until later in the week.

I was quite busy leading up to the trade deadline. I started with my midseason re-ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors. Then I started breaking down trades as they happened:

Plus a brief look at some of the teams that did the best and the worst at the deadline.

Meanwhile, I wrapped up everything I saw and played at Gen Con, including my top ten games of the convention (which saw a record 70,000 unique attendees), and reviewed the family cooperative game Miller Zoo.

I’ve had two great guests on the Keith Law Show from the music world – Susanna Hoffs, talking about her debut novel This Bird Has Flown and her new album The Deep End; and Joe Casey of Protomartyr, talking about their new album Formal Growth in the Desert and his beloved Tigers. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links, gathered over the last four weeks…

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last month was this lengthy New York Times story on how one family has dealt with the discovery that frontotemporal dementia, an inherited condition with no cure or treatment, is in their genes. It’s wonderfully written and centers the people without ever leering at or patronizing them.
The Washington Post looks at how a Saudi company is draining scarce water resources in Arizona.
The New Yorker profiled Sudan Archives, whose album Natural Brown Prom Queen was my #2 LP of 2022.
Ed Yong announced he’s leaving The Atlantic (not my employer), but he did file a long piece on the shattering effects of long COVID.
ProPublica continues to show how Harlan Crow bought himself a Supreme Court vote by treating Clarence Thomas to cruises on his yacht, securing Thomas’ support in cases that affected Crow’s tax bill.
Ohio voters rejected the state Republican party’s bid to make it harder for voters to pass constitutional amendments. That ballot question, which lost badly in the election this past Tuesday, was boosted by about $4 million from the U-Line company’s owners. If you own or work at a company that’s shipping any kind of goods, don’t buy your boxes and materials from U-Line. And if you get a package from anyone in a box made by U-Line, ask them to find another vendor.
Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the state’s Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick (R). Which is the party of freedom and liberty? And which supports cancel culture?
The President of Stanford has resigned after an investigation found manipulated research in three papers he co-authored.
Also from the Post, a moving story about a missing persons case from 13 years ago that the reporter who covered it couldn’t shake, and what it meant when the criminal case was finally solved.
Cory Doctorow points out how Tesla used its proprietary, DRM-protected software to tell drivers their cars had longer ranges than they actually did.
Efforts to reduce the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads numerous diseases including malaria and dengue, may end up thwarted by climate change. Several groups have released mosquitos infected with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the mosquitos’ offspring nonviable, but that bacterium can’t survive when temperatures are regularly 95 degrees and above.
This still seems so hard to believe, but scientists at the Livermore lab have used lasers to start a fusion reaction that created more energy than it required, which, in theory, could solve the looming energy crisis. I’m old enough to remember the “cold fusion” hoax, though, so I’d like to see a lot more of this.
Scientific American looks at how the four-color map problem was solved via brute force.
Donanemab may finally offer a huge step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, with trials showing it can reduce cognitive decline in early-stage patients.
RFK Jr’s conspiracy theory-laden campaign promises to make it easier for doctors to spread medical misinformation. Meanwhile, Sherri Tenpenny, who’s been pushing anti-vax garbage for probably twenty years now and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines would make people magnetic, had her medical license suspended by the state of Ohio for her failure to comply with an investigation.
Meanwhile, an independent reporter unveils who’s funding the COVID-19 misinformation outfit the Brownstone Institute.
This is almost a month old but it still holds up: Ron DeSantis has a Ron DeSantis problem.
Texas took over the Houston Independent School District and is now closing the libraries at 28 schools there to convert them into ~~jails~~ discipline centers.
WBEZ in Chicago published video showing Waukegan cops coercing a false confession from a 15-year-old.
Footage emerged in Los Angeles of a sheriff’s department deputy punching a mother who was holding her baby.
NPR examines the rising number of people without housing in this country and offers four reasons why we can’t solve this issue, although I think they ignored the reason that most voters won’t actually give up anything to help. Homelessness is someone else’s problem to way too many people.
As every media entity on earth tries to be cool by celebrating hip-hop’s 50^th birthday, the BBC notes several pioneers who’ve been “written out of (rap) history,” including the Last Poets, the Watts Brothers, and Gil Scott-Heron, the last of whom you might at least know as the author of the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
San Diego’s Juniper and Ivy might be my favorite restaurant in the country, and I was just there again in April. They’ve switched to a prix fixe menu for August that may be temporary, although I wonder if this is a trial balloon of sorts. I’ll still go there any time I’m in the best city in the country.
I’m not a big Starbucks customer; I don’t care for their coffee, although they do have good tea, and they offer a decent place to sit and work for a bit while I’m on the road. I’m going to have to rethink that as long as they’re engaging in a massive, dirty war against their own employees’ attempts to assert their right to organize.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Wizards & Co. is complete but you can still pre-order the game, which comes from the designers of games like Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Alma Mater.
Mistwind, designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu (Sagrada), is already about six times past its funding goal on Kickstarter.
The fourth Iron Rail game, Age of Rail: South Africa, has just three days to go on its Kickstarter. I have to admit I was not a fan of Iberian Gauge, the second in the series.
The next game from Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan) is Undergrove, which I believe is going to Kickstarter this fall. You can sign up here for updates from Alderac, the publisher.
You can also sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter for Perch, an area-control game with a modular board, launches in a few weeks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, coronavirus, links, longreads, ohio, physics, police, science, scotus, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ July 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:

My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
My AL team draft recaps
My NL team draft recaps
My post-draft Q&A
My final mock draft, if you’re curious

I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.

I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:

Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, antiscience, climate change, coronavirus, environment, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, rum, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The LA Times looks at solar farms in the deserts of the American southwest and the complex forces shaping their construction and spread, from environmentalists to monopoly utilities.
At The Intercept, Ilyse Hogue looks at the founding of the nationalist group The Federalist Society, which sparked the 40-year battle to end abortion access in the U.S.
The Atlantic profiles RFK Jr., calling him the first MAGA Democrat for his misinformation-filled anti-science platform, in a piece that, to rational readers, makes him look insane. I just hope reporters keep asking him which vaccines he deems safe.
Another U.S. government report concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began. The conspiracy theorists, including some authors who have profited by spreading the lab-link hoax, were not happy.
Speaking of RFK Jr., his drive to “debate” a scientist over vaccines is also misleading, because what he really wants is a platform to shout his views. Denialists are big fans of the Gish gallop, where you say so much that’s false in a short period of time that you drown your opponent, making rebuttals impossible.
You know who might hate RFK Jr. more than I do? Autistic people, whom he’s mocked and demonized for decades, spreading outdated and dangerous stereotypes about the neurodivergent.
Did a relative of yours send you one of those scaremongering stories about a new study showing that sucralose was “genotoxic” and causes cancer? Yeah, it’s not and it doesn’t. That study’s authors have misrepresented their data, and journalists who aren’t science literate – or choose not to be – ran with it.
All this anti-science and the associated distrust of public health comes at a substantial cost to society.
Striking reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Business Insider have gone old school and started their own strike papers, which, like Defector, give people a look at what worker-owned publications might look like.
All that money the U.S. spent to go find the remains of the Titan submersible will come from you, me, and all other American taxpayers.
The BBC looks at Community Violence Interventions, which may have prevented one or more revenge shootings in Chicago quite recently. It’s a better, cheaper approach to violence reduction in cities than spending more on police, which has no impact on violent crime rates.
A 53-year-old man who grew up with anti-LGBTQ+ views and has come around decided to go sit on the sidewalk at the Denver Pride parade with a sign saying “Recovering Bigot. I Am Sorry! Free Hugs.” The Washington Post interviewed him as he described the positive, inclusive, and forgiving environment he found.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order banning conversion therapy in the state, making it the 27^th to do so.
Did you hear about the imbroglio around New York City’s plans to force some of its pizzerias to clean up their ovens to reduce carbon emissions? That’s wrong. The plan isn’t new and the target is particulate emissions, not carbon dioxide, which should resonate with everyone who’s been in the path of wildfire smoke this summer.
Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-) used Texas taxpayer resources on a recent campaign trip there.
DeSantis keeps losing – in court, as a judge blocked the state’s ban on drag shows as likely unconstitutional.
Groomer alert: A Texas pastor convicted of sexually assaulting 14 girls was released from prison early for good behavior. But drag shows!
And then we have Justice Sam Alito, who took a trip to Rome paid for by a group that has filed briefs before SCOTUS, whose wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Department of Justice was fighting the EPA before the Court, and, of course, when he received questions from ProPublica about some of these improprieties, he ran to the Wall Street Journalandwrote a whiny pre-buttal instead of answering.
Keith Law Show guest Jason Kander, author of Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, is one of four veterans dealing with the disorder whose stories make up the new film Here. Is. Better. The New York Times gave it a positive review.
The Kingdom of Jordan wants to build a brand-new capital city in the Black Desert, where there is no infrastructure, no natural water access, nothing at all to sustain a city and its population.
Modern hunter-gatherers have a thriving gut microbiome compared to those of us who sit in a desk chair and write about baseball prospects and board games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, crime, florida, frauds, health, jordan, lgbt rights, links, longreads, police, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ June 24, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)

Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.

NPR affiliate KNKX looks at how Christopher Rufo, who made “critical race theory” an electoral rallying cry and is now going after trans people, went from a little-known City Council candidate to a right-wing influencer with links to two Presidential candidates.

The new chief of the 1100-person Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Native Americans in Louisiana is a 25-year-old coastal scientist who wants to help his tribe fight climate change and preserve their way of life.

Water recycling is the next big thing in building and urban planning, from commercial to residential properties.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona is making it way too hard for native populations to access their guaranteed water rights.

The Guardian spent three days interviewing the Kenyan Nobel Laureate Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow and A Grain of Wheat.

The BBC has a rare look at the famine and increased repression taking place right now in North Korea.

NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.

RFK Jr. is not a doctor or scientist; he’s a lawyer, with no medical or scientific background whatsoever. This TIME editorial explaining how and why RFK Jr. is “dead wrong” about vaccines was co-authored by a doctor and professor of global health.

Still not convinced? RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, the misleadingly-named Children’s Defense Fund, has been reaching out to neo-Nazi and white nationalist users to drum up support for him. Very fine people.

The Washington Post has more on how a fringe, Christian doctors’ group has spurred Republicans’ renewed war on abortion, transgender rights, and more.

The same billionaire who lavished gifts on SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has also donated over $450,000 to Republican Senators who might vote on judicial ethics reform.

The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.

Two old morons accused a nine-year-old girl of being trans at a track meet, stopping the event and demanding proof that the girl was cis. This is what comes of right-wingers spreading fear and hate of trans people just to gain political currency.

Writing in the Observer, Kathryn Bromwich argues for a more inclusive feminism and less focus on the distraction of transphobia, as there are far more pressing and practical issues confronting women today.

Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, vetoed a bill to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote by mail. He also approved a law that bans cities and counties in Texas from mandating water breaks for construction workers in the heat.

The BBC has the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy and nearly died as a result of the state’s draconian, misogynistic abortion ban.

The Speaker of the North Carolina House, Tim Moore (R), stands accused of using his position to gain sexual favors, including “engaging in group sex” with people looking to benefit politically.

The British newspaper The Times ran a story claiming that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, although they didn’t provide any evidence. It’s right in line with the paper’s AIDS denialist stance from the 1980s.

Elon Musk joining in and encouraging an attack against vaccine developer Dr. Peter Hotez has many scientists looking for the exit from Twitter.

Can you wash and reuse plastic zip-top bags? Yes, several times.

Barbara Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice.

PEN America referred to the removal of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me from a South Carolina school’s AP course list as “an outrageous act of government censorship.”

NBC News reporter Ben Collins received a Walter Cronkite Award for TV Political Reporting, earning special recognition for his “incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war,” and gave a great speech about fighting misinformation and the need to stand up for the truth.

Truthout has some details on billionaire Leonard Leo’s operation to try to buy up the American judiciary and impose a hard-right agenda on the country.

Looks like CNN and MSNBC learned one tiny lesson, refusing to broadcast Trump’s post-arraignment speech live, since they couldn’t fact-check it in real time.

A whole bunch of Trump supporters claimed they’d respond to his arraignment with violence. They did not. You can’t cave to these people.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) sent out a fundraising email for a “Trump Defense Fund” that would actually funnel most of the money to her.

On the bright side, Delaware’s at-large Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) announced that she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Tom Carper’s retirement. Delaware has never had a female Senator or a Senator of color.

Writer/activist Michael Harriot exposes some of the hypocrisy of Nikki Haley’s views and statements on race.

Verge explains the Reddit shutdown last week where multiple subreddits went dark for days to protest the company’s new policies.

The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.

Board game news: A new version of the 1980s classic game Crossbows & Catapults is now up on Kickstarter.

Tangerine Games launched a Kickstarter for yet another bird-themed game, the very pretty Nestlings.

Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Waypoints, a print-and-play game for $5, is also up on Kickstarter for one more week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, anti-science, baseball, board game news, book banning, con men, delaware, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, north korea, refugees, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, water

→ June 10, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’v e l e f t t h e U S f o r Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, book banning, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, Media, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ May 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/6/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted a ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft, and had a draft blog post earlier in the week that looked at Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, Kyle Teel, Jake Gelof, and Alex Mooney. I also did a Q&A at the Athletic to talk about the draft.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Will Leitch, whose new novel, The Time Has Come, comes out on May 16^th (pre-order here), talking about this book and his last one, plus a little about the Cardinals and just our general banter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Earth, one of the hottest new games of this year, one that reminds me a lot of Wingspan but with more of the engine-building.

I’m on Spoutible and Bluesky now, both as keithlaw.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New York looks at Richard Walter, a self-appointed criminal profiler who testified in multiple murder cases despite a lack of credentials and increasingly tall tales about his resume. National media coverage of Walter and his so-called “Vidocq Society” helped elevate his profile (no pun intended) and allowed him to continue pulling his con for two decades – even to this day.

We need a new antifungal drug to combat the spread of resistant Aspergillus fumigatus, and one’s on the way – but a fungicide that attacks the same molecular pathway may hit the market first and render the antifungal drug ineffective.

ProPublica explains how South Carolina Republicans booted the only woman on state’s Supreme Court and replaced her with a compliant male candidate instead.

Two articles on the murder of Jordan Neely: Intelligencer looks at New York City’s failure to grapple with the homeless epidemic, and Hellgate NY looks at the bystander effect and the people who watched Neely die and did nothing.

The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey had an exceptionally transparent and reflective response to its failure to respond to bullying of a student there who later committed suicide.

Herschel Walker’s Senate run never seemed like a serious endeavor, but a Daily Beast investigation found that he may have redirected over a half a million dollars in donations intended for his campaign to his personal accounts.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-developer of the Corbevax vaccine against COVID-19, wrote in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s BioAdvances journal about the threat of anti-science conspiracies among Americans to scientists and their work.

The anti-trans American College of Pediatricians left a huge batch of confidential files on an unsecured Google Drive account, including member info, tax records, and more. You can find their member list here if you want to check to see if your pediatrician (or one you know) belongs.

Scientific American offers a simple, lay explanation of what puberty blockers are and how they work, something I think most anti-trans arguers don’t understand.

Former GLAAD Chair Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman and activist, wrote for the Washington Post about how biological sex is determined in the brain, and it’s not just a matter of sex organs.

Three Texas churches donated to a political candidate in Abilene County, a clear tax code violation that should cost them their tax-exempt status.

The Health and Human Services Department has warned hospitals that deny women abortions when they experience medical emergencies that they are violating federal law.

The teen section at a library in an Indianapolis suburb was half empty after a “review” by the library board that cost $300,000.

More than half of the early adopters of Twitter Blue have already unsubscribed. It’s almost like the guy running the place lacks a business plan!

Putative Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy paid someone to remove unflattering content from his Wikipedia entry, which makes him a moron, because who the hell pays to edit Wikipedia?

Two anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists are on trial in the UK for plotting to destroy 5G cell towers.

E.J. Dionne wrote that we should follow Pres. Biden’s exhortation that we argue about freedom.

Marc Elias writes about how organization can’t defeat Republican voter suppression efforts.

I can’t even keep up with the tide of Clarence Thomas corruption stories, but here’s one I caught that doesn’t seem to have received enough attention – Harlan Crow said that tenant protections hurt his profits, and Thomas voted twice to end them.

Dire Wolf’s Kickstarter for Clank! Legacy Season 2 is already over $450,000. I have only played four of the ten chapters of the first one with my friend Mike, but we both really liked it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, democracy, links, longreads, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines, voter suppression

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