vaccines — Page 7

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, boardgames, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ December 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/2/23.

I had one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at the free-agent signings of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda plus some thoughts on what the Twins might do next. Some readers got very mad that I don’t think Chris Paddack will be a mid-rotation starter when he hasn’t been anything close to that since 2019.

Over at Paste, I ran through eight new board games that would be great stocking stuffers. I’ll do my year-end post for them the week of December 11^th. Also, here on the dish, I updated my ranking of my top 100 games all-time.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the new cookbook Veg-Table and the also wonderful cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter is moving from Tinyletter (which Mailchimp is shutting down) to Substack. If you already subscribed as of Tuesday of this past week, you’re fine – I was able to export the subscriber list and import it to Substack with no issues.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best headline of the week, and maybe the best obituary of the year, comes from Rolling Stone: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”
Republican state laws targeting LGBT people, pushing book bans, and wiping out reproductive rights are already leading to a brain drain from their jurisdictions.
The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo in Progressive’s commercials.
Tim Grierson interviewed the directors of the three seminal nuclear war films of 1983-84: Testament, The Day After, and Threads.
The Harvard Law Review asked a human rights attorney getting his doctorate at the school to write about the ongoing massacre happening in Gaza for the review’s blog, then refused to run the piece, for what seems to be fear of a backlash from faculty and members of the public sympathetic to Israel. The Nation ran the column instead.
Conspiracy theories around health and wellness ran rampant during the pandemic, and the far right and the far left have found common ground in them.
You probably saw this, but Futurism caught Sports Illustrated running AI-generated articles under fake bylines with stock AI-generated photos of the writers.
Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize this year for his novel Prophet Song, which I have not yet read, but I found this commentary on how the book is dismal and a sign of the Booker’s decline quite interesting – many literary awards seem to overvalue factors like the social importance of the subject, rather than just awarding it to the best book.
The head of the Florida GOP has been charged with sexual battery by a woman who claims she was involved in a threesome with him and his wife, who was part of the state’s Moms for Liberty chapter and worked to support the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” anti-LGBT bill.
Oh, and the (male) outreach director for the Philadelphia Moms for Liberty chapter served time in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy.
Meanwhile, a failed candidate for the school board in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, posed as the non-existent “Society of College Medicine” to challenge books in the district.
Americans’ desire for avocados is driving deforestation and violence in Mexico.
Penguin Random House, the largest teachers’ union in Iowa, and four authors (including Jodi Picoult, who went to the same elementary school I attended) are suing to overturn Iowa’s book-banning law, on the heels of another lawsuit over the law filed by the ACLU.
Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to target judges, possibly with impeachment, who rule in favor of voters’ choice to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
Teen girls targeted by AI deepfakes have little recourse through the law beyond ordinary cyberharassment complaints, which do little to address the lasting damage these pictures and videos can do.
The Columbia Journalism Review looked at how two major newspapers covered political races and issues in 2016 and 2022.
Measles cases are rising around the world thanks to anti-vaxxers and the online proliferation of false information about vaccines.
A woman in Texas who claimed reading one book with a “a single kiss” when she was 11 years old led to her to become a pornography addict actually works for a right-wing publisher that’s trying to compete with Scholastic to sell books to schools.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book banning, booker prize, environment, florida, iowa, links, longreads, ohio, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 18, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/18/23.

I offered my opinions of the Aaron Bummer and Cal Quantrill trades for subscribers to the Athletic. That Jake Bauers trade really didn’t move the needle, but I’ll probably include a thought or two on the Vidal Bruján trade when we get another one so I can include it in a longer column.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with film critic Matt Singer about his new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I appeared on Seattle’s 710 AM to discuss the Mariners’ possible offseason moves and the challenge of competing in the AL West in 2024.

My free email newsletter has returned, as I sent out a fresh edition last night, my second one this month.

And now, the links…

ProPublica looks at how two women died on the property of an Alaska Mayor, but no one’s ever been arrested or charged – even though they were both involved with the now ex-mayor’s sons, who both had histories of domestic violence.
Colorado banned forced labor in its prisons in 2018, but prisoners in the state are still being punished for refusing work assignments, according to an investigation from Bolts magazine.
The BBC has a great piece on the (im)possibility of time travel on the eve of the new season of Doctor Who.
Trump laid out some very autocratic aims if he’s elected in 2024. The New York Times looked at his plans for mass deportations and concentration camps for undocumented migrants. The Washington Post also looked at the same, as Greg Sargent refers to the “brutal reality” of the next election. And Axios has some details on Trump’s plan to install loyalists throughout the federal government, called Project 2025 and developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Elon Musk endorsed what amounts to a “Great Replacement Theory” tweet, leading IBM, Apple, and others to pause advertising on X.com. Full disclosure: As of this morning, my employer is still advertising on the site.
Delaware Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, one of two declared Democratic candidates for our gubernatorial race, has been caught up in a possible scandal around over $200,000 in campaign payments to her husband. She has claimed that it’s a repayment of a personal loan to the campaign.
Police in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a city right next to Albuquerque, responded to a home there where a woman said her caretaker was threatening to kill her. The police complimented the caretaker on his guns, one of which he used a few hours later to kill the woman in his care. It appears the police chief is saying his officers did nothing wrong.
Ohio Republicans suffered two huge losses on Election Day ballot questions, so now they’re pledging to defy the will of the people by stripping the judiciary of its powers, prompting Toledo entrepreneur Pete Kadens to write that Ohio is the most antidemocratic state in the country.
I posted a link a few weeks ago to the New York/ProPublica investigation into serial abuser Dr. Robert Hadden of Columbia University; the school has now set up a $100 million compensation fund and begun contacting his former patients, a turnaround from the school’s past attempts to act like they knew nothing of his crimes and bore no responsibility to his patients. Hadden was convicted of multiple sexual assaults in January and is serving a 20-year sentence.
No matter what you read on the internet, incidents of sudden cardiac death in college athletes have declined over the last twenty years.
A school in Iowa had to pay for increased security after a single teacher there posted a joke that Chaya Raichik, who posts as “LibsOfTikTok,” then shared to her 2.6 million followers with a tag identifying the school district.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, home to Middle Tennessee State University, passed an ordinance banning any public displays of homosexual behavior. The ACLU is already challenging it. MTSU hosts the state’s oldest LGBTQ+ student organization, MT Lambda, but I guess those kids just can’t step off campus.
The Atlantic looks at the plight of firstborn daughters, who are expected to be caregivers and to be high achievers in many cultures.
Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Boyer resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.
You should read this wonderful obituary of New Orleans resident Virginia Jane Smith, who died this month at age 98 and survived Hurricane Katrina by living for a week off boiled eggs, water, and whiskey. As the headline says, may her memory be a blessing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, colorado, delaware, guns, links, longreads, metoo, new mexico, ohio, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ November 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ November 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.

After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic column by Simon Sebag Montefiore on the decolonization narrative around Gaza and Israel has been shared, critiqued, attacked, and so on more than anything else I’ve seen on the conflict. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t agree with every point the author makes, but it is thoughtful and does make some very good points. The twenty minutes it took me to read it was time well spent, and I can’t say that about many things I read in general, certainly not on a topic as fraught as this one. Adam Serwer, also in the Atlantic, wrote a shorter piece arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By the way, the staid Financial Times’ editorial board called for a humanitarian cease-fire this week.
This harassment case at UC Berkeley is absolutely bonkers, yet there are students protesting in favor of the professor who harassed a colleague so extensively that she’s been banned from campus – apparently because she’s a person of color and her victim is not?
The Verge’s Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive on “the people who ruined the internet,” search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, asking if they ruined search or if search is even ruined at all.
When LibsofTikTok, the anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account run by former realtor Chaya Raichik, tweets about a hospital, a school, a library, or a private individual, threats of violence follow. USA Today built off research from the liberal group Media Matters to find over two dozen incidents where bomb or death threats followed a LibsofTikTok tweet. She’s particularly targeting public schools, with USA Today identifying at least twelve incidents where a school received threats after she tweeted about it.
The New York Times has the story of a French case where a 15-year-old girl falsely accused a 17-year-old boy, the son of Moroccan immigrants, of raping her, only to recant 23 years later. This very humanist retelling looks at the toll the false accusation took on Farid El Haïry’s life even though he only spent a year or so in prison, and how difficult it still is for him to move on.
JAMA has yet another study showing that masks work in limiting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. I do still wear one when traveling, at least, since it’s the one time I’m in proximity to a lot of strangers. Very few others do, even on airplanes.
There’s a rising trend of hidden MLMs on TikTok, pushed by self-styled ‘experts’ selling detoxification products for kids. Just a reminder that for almost every human, the liver handles detox responsibilities. You don’t need anything else.
Increased belief in false health information is driving vaccine acceptance down. Looking forward to the return of preventable childhood diseases!
STIs are on the rise as states found out they’re not getting the last two years’ worth of a $1 billion federal program to fight these infections as the program was cut during the debt ceiling deal.
A new preprint (meaning it’s not peer-reviewed yet) available on the SocArXiv server argues that merely platforming extreme right-wing actors normalizes their viewpoints even in the face of critical interviewing or coverage. In other words, sunshine may not always be the best disinfectant.
Related: Stew Peters, who hosts a program on Rumble and has a sizable following on Twitter, called for shooting Catholic Charities workers who help would-be immigrants to the United States. Peters has had some prominent figures as guests on his show, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Arizona Republicans Kari Lake, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams is now under investigation for possible illegal campaign donations from the Turkish government.
Mayor Adams and new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have something in common – both believe, and say, that they were put in their positions by God. God is, as the article says, unavailable for comment.
Several House Republicans introduced a bill to expel Palestinians from the United States, because it’s 1933.
WIRED covers some myths and truths about smartphone batteries.
Littleton, New Hampshire, is considering banning public art because some folks didn’t like a diversity mural that was partly organized by a local Pride group. One of the town’s three council members makes no bones about bringing her religion into her government job, saying that the Bible says that “homosexuality is an abomination.”
Speaking of bans, Republicans are trying to Newspeak their way out of their abortion-banning policies – the word “ban” appears at least six times in relation to abortion in the Republican Party platform – by pushing back on the use of the word “ban” at all. They’re testing this out in Virginia, which has legislative elections on Tuesday, and if they succeed there, they’ll roll this out nationwide for next November.
A lawsuit in Texas, filed there by an anti-abortion activist to try to get the most favorable court possible, could bankrupt Planned Parenthood by making specious claims that the nonprofit needs to return reimbursements to Medicaid.
An Alabama mayor and pastor killed himself after he was outed as LGBTQ+. A right-wing news site posted photos of F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in women’s clothing and claimed he referred to himself as a trans woman.
HBO CEO Corey Bloys used sockpuppet and burner accounts to try to troll and deride critics of the channel’s programming or of him personally.
There’s a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe caused by a lack of access to clean water.
The BBC examines the dark side of touch-screen tipping, and some of the psychology involved in why we tip more on these platforms.
Over at Field of Schemes, Neil deMause exposes how Jackson County, Missouri, might actually give the Royals over $6 billion in funding for a new stadium the team doesn’t need.
I linked a few weeks ago to the dubious reason that Target was giving for the closure of some Seattle stores, citing rising crime. Popular.info found data showing those stores were affected less by crime than those in surrounding areas. Do not just take corporations’ words as gospel.
The wonderful, quirky Weckerly’s Ice Cream in Fishtown, Philadelphia, is closing in December.
Here’s a nice palate cleanser: GQ interviewed Danny DeVito.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, coronavirus, health, links, longreads, middle east, misinformation, new hampshire, new york, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ 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

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