vaccines — Page 9

→ May 8, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

I got back out to a minor league game last week and wrote about the prospects I saw for subscribers to the Athletic, focusing on Jackson Rutledge (Nationals) and Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles). I’ll have a post up Sunday or Monday on Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, followed by a ranking of draft prospects later in the week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new card game Flourish, co-designed by the person behind the outstanding 2018 game Everdell.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Louisville catcher Henry Davis, one of the top prospects in this year’s MLB Draft; I also answered a number of your questions, mostly about the draft but also one about my three-legged cat. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter

And now, the links…

Longreads first: And I do mean long, as this piece from WIRED‘s June 2020 issue – which I don’t remember seeing last year – on the rise, fall, and rise again of white-hat hacker Marcus Hutchins, who played the biggest role in stopping the WannaCry ransomware worm, is exceptionally well-written and well-reported, and it runs nearly 15,000 words.
Almost as good is this New Yorker profile of legendary yet reclusive Simpsons writer turned self-published detective novelist John Swartzwelder, who is responsible for “Homer At the Bat” and one of my favorite SNL sketches, “Those Unlucky Andersons.”
A small number of wealthy donors to Trump now wield outsized influence within the GOP – and potentially over our government, too – just by virtue of their seven- and eight-figure donations.
Four L.A. cops coerced a 13-year-old boy into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A court ruled they get qualified immunity on some of the potential charges against them, because they didn’t coerce him for a long enough period of time. What if – stay with me here – we just ended qualified immunity for cops?
The controversy over the University of Texas’ racist fight song continues, as a perfectly normal person brought a gun to a Zoom discussion on the topic. I assume he shot his computer to own the libs.
Anti-diversity activists won big in a school board election outside Dallas, because, you know, Texas has no history of racism you might want to teach to schoolchildren.
Teachers in Rockwood, Missouri, are now facing threats and harassment over that school district’s diversity curriculum. In a state where you stand on your porch with semi-automatic weapons to face peaceful protesters, this fits.
An Idaho legislative intern alleges her boss, Aaron von Ehlinger (who has since resigned in disgrace), raped her, and in return, several other members of the Idaho legislature – all Republicans – doxxed her, harassed her, and tried to get her charged with filing a false report. Two of those other legislators are women.
It’s time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant, says USA Today editorial writer and former federal prosecutor Michael Stern.
Centner Academy, a private primary school in Miami, has become a “beacon” for anti-vaxxers, as the school is turning away vaccinated students and staff because of the bogus idea that they can “shed” the virus. (The vaccine does not contain the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus vaccinated people have nothing to “shed.” This is sheer ignorance.) Linda Centner, who founded and runs the school, has espoused all sorts of anti-science conspiracy theories, including anti-mask views and baseless fears of 5G cell towers.
Meanwhile, one former anti-vaccine influencer in Texas got her COVID-19 shot and is talking about it publicly.
Is some anti-vaccine loon in your life claiming there are hundreds of reports of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 jab? Well, here’s a thread explaining why those reports, from VAERS, don’t actually mean any of these reactions were to the vaccines – if they happened at all.
Is there some hope on the horizon for a vaccine against HIV? It’s still a ways off, but a new breakthrough at least means there’s the possibility of such an inoculation, although retroviruses are extremely difficult to treat with antivirals or prevent via vaccines.
Regardless of your opinion of the filibuster, it’s not the thing preventing Democrats from enacting major legislation right now.
Speaking of which, President Biden wants to create a family leave plan that would put the U.S. in line with other developed nations. We are far worse off than our peers in Europe and parts of eastern Asia when it comes to quality-of-life laws.
Hold your surprise, but white authorities in Arkansas executed a Black man who may very well have been innocent. The death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished everywhere.
A Black homeowner in Indianapolis found the appraisal of her house went up for $100,000 when she removed items that might have hinted at her race, and had a white friend pose as the homeowner.
An Israeli man visiting relatives in Baltimore was shot and killed, possibly because he was Jewish.
Eleven Madison Park, one of the most acclaimed (and expensive) restaurants in the world, will reopen with a completely plant-based menu, at $335 a person.
Signal tried to place ads on Instagram showing just how much the social-media site (owned by Facebook) knows about you, but Instagram banned the ads instead.
This BBC story of a stranded sailor who couldn’t leave his ship for four years is fascinating and a little horrifying.
Stars, they’re just like us! Kate Winslet loves Wawa. As a non-native who has been converted to the cult of Wawa, I say to Kate, welcome.
Google Doodle celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week by animating some StoryCorps stories of teachers who made a difference in specific students’ lives, such as this wonderful one from Dr. William Lynn Weaver.
The Guardian explains why the Carters looked so tiny in that photo with the Bidens. (I mean Pres. Jimmy and Rosalynn, not Jay-Z and Beyoncé.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Floodgate Games’ upcoming title Vivid Memories has 13 days to go.
Michael Luu, designer of the upcoming cooperative game Mission ISS, wrote a designer diary about his experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, dark money, links, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, vegan

→ May 1, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/1/21.

I had two posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on how the Rockies’ next GM might start to turn the franchise around, and a draft scouting notebook looking at several day-one candidates, led by Fordham lefty Matt Mikulski.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, talking about this year’s MLB draft class. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the many victims of disgraced writer/teacher Blake Bailey came forward to tell how Bailey manipulated and raped her.
Alameda police killed Mario Gonzalez, who was unarmed, by pinning him to the ground for five minutes during an arrest on April 19^th. This is a systemic issue.
CloseCallSports has the best explanation of the obstruction call in Milwaukee that I tried to explain on Twitter, only to have my replies explode with people who didn’t like the call. An umpire can make a call that is technically correct – and Marty Foster’s was, indeed, justified by the rules – but so rarely made that we assume it’s wrong.
Tony LaRussa’s animal welfare nonprofit is plagued by claims of racism and a toxic workplace environment. Between this and his multiple DUIs, LaRussa’s hiring by the White Sox this offseason looks even more suspect. Over at Sox Machine, Jim Margalus talks about some of what LaRussa is doing wrong on the field, too.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced that residents aged 16-35 who get the COVID-19 vaccine will get a $100 savings bond, an ingenious use of the stimulus funding the state has received.
After years of misguided opposition, Florida officials will finally release genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the kind responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and more, to stop the insects’ offspring from surviving into adulthood.
Anti-vaxxers are adopting yellow stars and other symbols of the Holocaust, in case you were wondering how low they would sink in their war against science and rationality.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Museum is pushing revisionist history that absolves Poles of their role in the Holocaust (Haaretz, $ required).
PBS has a new series coming up on May 11^th called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, about the extraordinary success of vaccines and other major medical advances that helped double our life expectancy in a century.
Facebook claimed they removed the “Disinformation Dozen,” twelve people responsible for the vast majority of anti-vaccine lies on the internet, but ten of them are still active on the site.
Joe Rogan told his millions of young listeners not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. That is dangerously irresponsible, and he shouldn’t be issuing medical advice.
Julie DiCaro reminds us not to listen to people with obvious conflicts of interest – agents, lawyers, fans – when they try to downplay charges of sexual assault against popular athletes.
Fox News is struggling to “pick a side” when their culture-war takes conflict with the facts, as with two recent manufactured outrage stories that turned out to be false – that Biden would ban or limit meat consumption, and that migrant children were being given Kamala Harris’ book.
The BBC asks why the west neglects a potential superfood source that’s efficient, sustainable, and climate-friendly: insects.
Epicurious revealed that they won’t publish any new beef recipes, part of an effort to encourage more sustainable eating. They stopped publishing those a year ago and they say nobody has noticed.
Conservative writer Gary Abernathy argues that all conservatives should support reparations to Black Americans.
From the National Review, the “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer to Tucker Carlson’s misinformation.
University researchers appear to have moved and possibly lost the remains of two children killed in Philadelphia’s bombing of its own citizens in 1985, part of a government assault on the MOVE cult.
Deforestation in the amazon has soared under the reactionary Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, devastating native homelands and reducing one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks.
A teacher in Washington State’s Issaquah School District is on administrative leave after parents objected to a poem she used in her anti-racism curriculum
Ashley Feinberg may have found JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts. Dimon has been accused of misleading investors in the “London Whale” investment disaster and of overseeing a culture of discrimination at his banks.
Board game news: Capstone Games is reissuing the Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement classic Glass Road, and pre-orders are open now at $10 off.
Renegade has a Kickstarter going for the ‘epic mad scientist’ game My Father’s Work, which they say will only be sold through their website once it’s released.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, police, racism, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ April 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, blm, coronavirus, longreads, new york city, racism, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
Cymru am byth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arkansas, coronavirus, links, longreads, maine, north carolina, racism, science, social media, vaccines, west virginia

→ March 15, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/21.

I have one new post up for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at prospects I can’t wait to see when minor league games resume. I also held a Klawchat last week.

On the Keith Law Show last week, I spoke with Cleveland right-hander Triston McKenzie about his development as a pitcher and his experiences as a Black ballplayer. On this week’s episode, I spoke with film critic Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Holi: Festival of Colors, played on a 3-D board that’s immediately striking and that lends itself to some novel strategies, with almost no random elements at all.

For more of my writing, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica’s look at some of the mental health costs borne by teenagers during the pandemic is a long, grueling read, and while it might go a little too far in blaming the lockdown for teen suicides, it’s as balanced a look at this as I’ve seen. The piece pairs well with the New York Times’ stunning gallery of artwork from teenagers using multiple media to show how the pandemic and lockdown have affected them.
Ann Patchett has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about letting go of one’s stuff, which she refers to by the euphemism of ‘practice.’
The Atlantic profiles Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), now the front-runner for the Senate seat coming open in 2022, including a look at an incident that took place while he was mayor of Braddock that will probably become a major issue in the campaign.
Bloomberg takes aim at racial inequity in the property tax system, where Black-owned properties are overvalued in tax assessments in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.
Jelani Cobb asks if the Republican Party is destroying itself by focusing so heavily on white men, a declining portion of the electorate, to the point that “voter suppression becomes the only viable strategic option.” I wouldn’t underestimate the role that dark money can play in keeping them in power, whether through voter suppression or by targeting Latinx populations as they did in 2020.
“In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections.” Why do Republicans hate Christians?
Related: At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to make it harder for people to vote. It’s about gaining and clinging to power at all costs. Stacey Abrams detailed some of those bills in a Twitter thread.
Facebook is finally, belatedly cracking down on anti-vaccine content, but it’s having a very hard time because it started so late and makes it too easy for users to share false information. One thing they could do, however, is focus on the small group of users having the greatest impact on others’ vaccine doubts. Meanwhile, those anti-vaxxers are pushing the lie that the vaccines cause cancer.
Also in “what took you so long,” the FDA warned quack Joseph Mercola to stop hawking fake COVID-19 treatments. He’s been pushing pseudoscience and outright anti-science for at least 25 years, all in the service of selling his supplements.
A new research study, published in Nature, found evidence of higher mortality rates from the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, which is now the predominant strain in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why he thinks the NFT bubble is destined to pop.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s editor wrote a column defending the paper’s decision not to cover a fringe Republican candidate’s outlandish statements, calling him a “nobody begging for people to notice his tweets.”
In a victory for people who remember the First Amendment, Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri was acquitted of bogus charges stemming from her coverage of police activity during a BLM protest.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a bill protecting drivers who hit protestors from prosecution, as long as they say it was an accident.
Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the problem of child marriages involving kidnapped Christian, Sikh, and Hindu girls, forced to convert to Islam and marry under threats of violence to them or family members.
A writer with autism watched Sia’s execrable movie Music and wrote about its awfulness for Slate.
This Irish Times editorial on the Meghan-and-Harry interview is a marvel of excoriating humor.
Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died last week at age 91.
Board game news: Asmodee acquired Plan B games, yet another notch in the former company’s acquisition spree, but also notable because Plan B was founded by Sophie Gravel, who sold her last company, F2Z (which included Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat), to Asmodee in 2016, then left and starter Plan B, which also includes the imprints Next Move and eggertspiele.
Some Kickstarters of note include the dice-game version of Baseball Highlights 2045; the new roll-and-write game Three Sisters, from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game; and two new expansions for Everdell.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, georgia, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects in this year’s draft class, with the caveat of course that we’ll likely see a lot of movement this spring because most college players didn’t play at all last summer or fall. I also answered some questions on the Padres’ farm system for our beat writer Dennis Lin. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week is Aaron Fitt of D1baseball.com, talking about this year’s draft class, Kumar Rocker vs. Jack Leiter, and other topics around college baseball. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

The latest edition of my free email newsletter was about how it feels when the face in the mirror finally starts to catch up with your biological age. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED looks at the strange economy of scandals in Hollywood and the man who often inserts himself into the deals made around them.
In 1963, Alderman Ben Lewis, a rising political figure in Chicago and one of the most powerful Black men in the city government, was killed in his office, execution-style, but the city made sure not to investigate it thoroughly. ProPublica examines why not, and whether the police may have been involved in the murder.
Anti-vaxxers are now misusing federal data to lie about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they pose dangers that aren’t supported by evidence. Alex Berenson, once a promising New York Times reporter, has now gone from cannabis alarmist to COVID-19 denialist to full-blown anti-vaxxer, using his sizable Twitter following to encourage fellow deniers and discourage people from getting the vaccine.
The Washington Post examines the history of lies and fraud that propelled Madison Cawthorn to the House of Representatives.
From last August, Current Affairs explains that police aren’t the answer if crime isn’t actually the question.
The Guardian has the story of the battle over the Wentworth golf club in Surrey, England, which they describe as a battle between the rich and the very, very rich.
Georgia Public Broadcasting has an update on the voter suppression bills currently in the works in the state.
Kayla Parker, a 25-year-old Black activist, is trying to mobilize Tennessee voters the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.
Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator in California, writes that anti-vaccine extremism is a form of domestic terrorism.
David Leonhardt, writing the daily briefing for the New York Times, explains why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just as effective as the other two vaccines on the market already, even though misleading headlines show lower efficacy rates.
The University of Texas is embroiled in a completely avoidable controversy over a racist song sung by some fans of their football team. Some angry white donors sent some rather telling emails to the school, threatening to pull their donations if the racist song was banned, because you can’t have college football if you don’t get to do a racism.
The Atlantic reports on the success of a small Universal Basic Income experiment in Stockton, California. The United States is the stingiest developed country when it comes to helping people in our lowest income strata. That needs to change if we don’t want to lose the economic and social gains of the last century.
New York Times opinion page writer David Brooks, who hates millennials but married one anyway, has been taking a second salary from the Weave Project, funded by Facebook and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ father, without disclosing the potential conflict of interest to his editors or his readers.
A U.S. diplomat has been railing against Jews and promoting the idea of a Christian nation-state online for years and is somehow still employed by the Foreign Service.
Wealthy residents of one town in the Florida Keys received COVID-19 vaccines before most of the state … and, oh, hey, a bunch of donors to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) live there.
Dan Dakich, an announcer for ESPN and a former assistant coach who has denied being there when Bobby Knight choked Neil Reed, doxxed a UNC teacher and threatened to sexually assault an Ursinus professor. Somehow, four days later, ESPN hasn’t suspended him or taken any other action. Sure seems like they move a lot faster when the tweets are about evolution, doesn’t it?
Former WNBA owner and former Senator Kelly Loeffler lost control of her basketball team to a player whom she refused to meet to discuss their differences of opinion.
The former head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America racked up over $1 million in taxpayer-funded expenditures to investigate his own employees to find reasons to fire them. I thought the Republicans were the party of smaller government and less waste?
These transgender athlete bills pushed by Republican lawmakers – who don’t care about athletes of any identities, only about staying in power – are a solution in search of a problem, according to critics of one such bill in Missouri.
Hundreds of scientists and researchers have signed an open letter to President Biden saying that evidence-based policy should mean decriminalizing sex work. Doing so would be the best way to protect the interests and health of the workers themselves.
Board Game News: Red Rising, the latest release from publisher Stonemaier Games (Scythe, Charterstone, Pendulum), is now available for pre-order.
Alderac has a Kickstarter up for Meeples & Monsters that funded fully in just 15 minutes.
And there’s also a Kickstarter for High Noon, a card-based strategy game for 2+ players, where the first 4000 people to fund the game will get their copies as soon as the Kickstarter closes – the first I’ve seen of this in a board game crowdfunding effort.
The British Museum offers a look at ten board games from ancient history.
And finally, watch a doctor dismantle Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s ignorant claims on sex and gender in about 30 seconds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, social media, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/20/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, all of my prospect ranking content is now on the site, from the top 100 to the org rankings to every team’s top 20 & org report:

Arizona	Houston	Oakland
Atlanta	Kansas City	Pittsburgh
Baltimore	LA Angels	St. Louis
Boston	LA Dodgers	San Diego
Chicago Cubs	Miami	San Francisco
Chicago White Sox	Milwaukee	Seattle
Cincinnati	Minnesota	Tampa Bay
Cleveland	NY Mets	Texas
Colorado	NY Yankees	Toronto
Detroit	Philadelphia	Washington

Podcasts: I was remiss in omitting these from my newsletter this week, but I appeared on several podcasts to talk prospects and rankings, including the Sox Machine podcast, the East Village Times podcast, and the Eutaw Street Report (Apple/Spotify). I’ve also recorded a spot on The Update with Adam Copeland, our Bay Area sports podcast at the Athletic, that should be available next week.

On my own podcast this week, I did a mailbag episode and ripped through as many of your questions as I could in about 35 minutes. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I finally sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, talking a little bit about the anxiety and joy of releasing all of this content into the world. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: At the Ringer, David Hill writes about a “beach bum” day trader who made millions with a long position on GameStop he’d started buying long before this year’s run-up.
The expanding ocean habitats of mackerel have led to a new debate over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
A new Malayalam-language film called The Great Indian Kitchen explores gender inequality in the Indian home.
The Huffington Post’s obituary of Rush Limbaugh just tells it like it is.
Critical thinking skills, already in short supply, may not be the most effective counter to disinformation. The SIFT method – Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to original context – may be a better approach.
Denmark has invested in tracking the different variants of COVID-19 spreading in its population, and the data so far on B.1.1.7, the UK variant, are not promising. This Science piece looks at some of the policy options ahead of them, and, potentially us.
An immunocompromised patient who died after a 154-day infection with COVID-19 may hold a clue to how the variants have emerged and spread.
Why are cases dropping so fast in the United States? Four reasons: distancing, seasonality, seroprevalence (partial immunity), and vaccines.
New data have shown that the pandemic has hit academic mothers especially hard.
Rational people in Connecticut are trying to eliminate the religious exemption to schoolchild vaccination requirements and the Republican Party is lining up with the loonies.
An Ohio State wrestler testified that Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked him to help cover up allegations of sexual abuse by the team doctor while Jordan was assistant coach.
There was a big social media kerfuffle this week when various gynecologists took aim at Vagisil for deceptive ads targeting teen girls. Led by Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible and sometime New York Times columnist, they argued that the company was preaching products that could be harmful while also shaming girls for things that are natural.
ERCOT officials said that Texas was mere minutes away from a catastrophic system failure that could have left Texans without power for months. The Huffington Post looks at why the storm knocked out so much of the power and how right-wing grifters and charlatans blamed it all falsely on green energy.
A tiny town in Iowa – Armstrong, population 840 – saw its mayor, police chief, city clerk, and former city clerk all arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and “the deployment of a Taser against a civilian in exchange for cash.”
I can’t seem to muster any sympathy for the investor who gave $2.5 million for a “voter fraud” investigation and now wants his money back.
The Reply All podcast was starting a new series on the toxic workplace environment at Bon Appetit that led to the ouster of longtime EIC Adam Rapoport in 2020 when a similar scandal took down Reply All’s co-host and the senior reporter leading this story.
Nicole Hazen, the wife of Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen, has been fighting a brain tumor for the last year, and the two of them chose to discuss it publicly.
Many prominent British actors are urging the UK government to renegotiate visa rules so they can continue to work in the EU.
Literary Hub’s list of 50 classic novels under 200 pages is pretty good, at least based on the half I’ve read and the others I know about.
I greatly enjoyed McSweeney’s Valentine’s Day gifts from famous fictional men.
But nothing made me laugher harder this week than this twitter thread about a Texas survivalist nut who isn’t very good at the survival part.
Board game news: I don’t know much about this game but folks are very excited for the Kickstarter for Stroganov.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, Humor, iowa, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 13, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/13/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, my ranking of all 30 organizations ran this week on Wednesday, followed by my team-by-team reports and top 20s for the AL East and AL Central:

The remaining four divisions will run on Monday through Thursday of this week. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Bobby Heck, Special Assistant to the GM of the Tampa Bay Rays and one of the architects of the Rays’ 2020 AL champs and the multiple pennant-winning Astros teams of a few years ago. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

At Paste, I reviewed the press-your-luck game 7 Summits, co-designed by the designer of Sagrada.

My last edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials; I’m overdue for another issue because I’ve been writing the team reports and top 20s. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New Republic looks at QAnon and the cultification of the American right, which will continue without Trump and without the nonexistent Q. The same publication argued that the Democratic Party does not understand the QAnon phenomenon, which has enraptured more educated, well-off people than the Democrats think.
Also from the New Republic – this is a coincidence – the alt-right problem in standup comedy, where people like Gavin McInnes have tried to use comedy to legitimize their racist beliefs.
The Republican Party has willingly allied itself with armed self-styled militias.
Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, has sued a reporter for filing a FOIA request. The only way you could more directly assault freedom of the press would be to arrest the reporter – which I assume is next.
Donald Trump’s incompetence and science denial has helped the U.S. have the highest case and death rates from COVID-19 in the developed world. A new panel estimates that 40% of the deaths were attributable to federal government policies – not just our late response, but structural problems like reduced access to health insurance and growing income inequality. Trump inherited a bad public health situation and made it much worse.
Governors across the U.S. are allowing more and more indoor dining before enough people are vaccinated to control the pandemic, which could lead to greater spread of the more infectious variants already present in the country. Delaware has been among the best states in testing and in vaccinations, but we’re already moving to 50% occupancy in restaurants, which seems contrary to scientist’s recommendations.
“The only truly clean energy is less energy.” So-called “clean” energy requires a lot of dirty infrastructure.
Phoenix police may have specifically targeted Black activist Bruce Franks, Jr., when they arrested him and hit him with a variety of serious charges after his arrest during an August 2020 protest. The grand jury that indicted him didn’t see any video from the event, but were only given police testimony, which this ABC15 investigation found included multiple false statements.
Earwig and the Witch, the first 3-D animated film from Studio Ghibli, is a disaster across the board. It’s directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
Instagram has banned anti-vaxxer and COVID-19 denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. All platforms should do the same. He’s a menace to public health, and his words will lead to more deaths.
If you’ve been to a baseball game in Arizona, you likely have heard vendor Derrick Moore and his signature “Lemonade, lemonade, like grandma made!” call. He’s facing some sort of serious medical issue and doesn’t have health insurance – nice country we have here, folks – so there’s a GoFundMe to try to help him.
My daughter and I have been watching The Mandalorian, which is entertaining but hasn’t quite lived up to the hype for us – nearly every problem the main character faces is solved by shooting everyone in sight. Anyway, Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune, will not be returning for season 3 after months of tweets that ranged from transphobia to COVID-19 denial to false claims about the election, with a recent post comparing the negative consequences she’s facing to the Nazi genocide against Jews. My best guess is that Disney had warned her they wouldn’t renew her contract if she didn’t knock it off, and she did it anyway.
TikTok might be good for the music industry, but it’s not good for good music, as the recent soporific “Drivers License,” which has spent four weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, demonstrates.
President Biden promised to fire any of his subordinates who harassed colleagues or otherwise treated them inappropriately, but the first major test of that came this week when a Deputy Press Secretary threatened to “destroy” a Politico reporter for writing about a relationship he had with an Axios writer. As of Friday night, the Deputy Press Secretary had only been suspended for a week. It’s not acceptable.
France has arrested five people so far for making online death threats against a teenager known as Mila, who posted several Islamophobic statements on social media.
Board game news: Renegade announced pre-orders for the June release of the second edition of Gravwell.
Asmodee’s years-long acquisition spree went in a new direction this week with the purchase of BoardGameArena, one of the most popular online board gaming sites. W. Eric Martin has some analysis of what this means over at BoardGameGeek.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coronavirus, energy, hoaxes, links, longreads, star wars, vaccines

→ February 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/6/21.

I had two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week: a breakdown of the Nolan Arenado trade, and a look at a dozen prospects who just missed my top 100 ranking. That ranking ran the previous Thursday. I did a video chat via the Athletic’s Twitter account on Tuesday. Org rankings will run on February 10^th, and team by team reports begin the next day.

I’ve had two podcasts since my show returned from my holiday break last month, with guests Britt Ghiroli, national baseball writer for the Athletic; and Seattle Mariners prospect Adam Macko, who was born in Slovakia and first learned to play baseball in Bratislava. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Cloud City, by one of my favorite designers (Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold), but it was a huge disappointment.

My last edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials; I’m overdue for another issue because I’ve been writing the team reports and top 20s. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the worst and most generally underreported aspects of Trump’s reign of error was the spate of executions of federal inmates while Trump was a lame duck. ProPublica has the inside story of their rush to kill as many people as possible.
Jeff Passan has the incredible story of outfielder Drew Robinson, his improbable survival from a suicide attempt, and his ongoing effort to come back to baseball despite losing an eye. My colleague Levi Weaver shared his own story of depression in the wake of Robinson’s story.
“We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” This editorial is deeply philosophical but ties into multiple issues of our day, including the erosion of privacy and the velocity of misinformation.
The Guardian looks at the power of Big Lens, the duopoly that controls most of the world’s eyeglasses market.
Josh Miller, a spring training announcer for the Giants, has resigned after an Arizona state Senator revealed that he was sending her vulgar, misogynistic tweets.
Tanzania’s government has rejected the COVID-19 vaccine as part of their ongoing denial that the virus even exists in their country, which appears to be run by MAGA people (MATA?).
Dungeons & Dragons has an anti-Semitism problem, derived from its use of JRR Tolkien’s mythology and non-human races – the dwarves were, by his own admission, a mythical representation of some awful Jewish stereotypes.
Anti-vaccine terrorists put a temporary halt to a mass vaccination setup at Dodgers Stadium. I have no sympathy for these people. This is terrorism and they should be charged as such, and Facebook should be held responsible for their tacit aid in promoting it.
Those same anti-vaxxer nuts are also misusing the federal VAERS database to spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. If someone uses VAERS to claim the vaccines are unsafe, just ignore them. That data is not clean or reliable enough to use for that purpose.
That misinformation, combined with systemic inequalities in our health-care system, means that the mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spell disaster for our Black communities.
Speaking of terrorists, one of the people who has been charged with storming the Capitol on January 6^th has asked a judge to allow her to travel to Mexico for a “work retreat.” I’ve seen a lot of articles saying permission was granted, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Erik Malinowski was right: Never tweet.
Fifty years of cuts to the top marginal tax rates did not result in “trickle-down” benefits for people in lower income strata, according to a recent study out of LSE (which I may have linked previously, but it came up recently when my daughter asked about JFK and Reagan as Presidents).
St. Louis is now paying a $5 million settlement to a (Black) protester beaten by four (white) cops who turned out to be an undercover cop himself. Great use of tax funds, guys.
Rochester police officers pepper-sprayed a suicidal 9-year-old girl, renewing scrutiny of the department’s use of a hood on a Black man who suffocated as a result.
Did a supermassive black hole influence the evolution of life on earth? Something to muse about, at least.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump continued to enrich themselves as a result of their unappointed, unelected positions in the Administration in 2020, with combined income of at least $23.8 million. The grift worked, folks.
Copper and Cotton, one of the most acclaimed new restaurant in the Phoenix area of the last few years, is closing as its head chef is moving to Utah.
Board game news: Jamey Stegmaier, designer and owner of Stonemaier games, asks if the Kickstarter mindset is increasing consumer confusion around things like ‘deluxe’ components and special versions of new games.
Japanese publisher Oink Games has a Kickstarter up for three new titles, one of which is a reimplementation of three previous game Deep Sea Adventure.
Tweet of the week:

pic.twitter.com/Etccw1hPdp
— Jon Adams™ (@citycyclops) February 1, 2021

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coronavirus, death penalty, Economics, links, mental health, rochester, social media, st. louis, stick to baseball, suicide, tanzania, the swamp, vaccines

→ January 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/23/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the George Springer signing and the Joe Musgrove trade. My top 100 prospects ranking will appear on Thursday, January 28^th, with the org rankings and team top 20s running the week of February 8^th.

For Paste, I reviewed New York Zoo, a light tile-placement game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Patchwork, Cottage Garden, and Agricola.

I’ll send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend, with some exciting personal news. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Harvard magazine looks at the loneliness pandemic, which predated the COVID-19 one but has been exacerbated by the last ten months of shutdowns and isolation.

California’s public utilities regulator fired an employee who found $200 million due to disadvantaged state residents had gone missing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic that now that Trump is gone, we need to reckon with how he got into office in the first place.

A vaccine-hesitant mom rushed to vaccinate her kids when the pandemic hit, and she talked to NPR about how she ended up hesitant based on bad information she found onilne.

Trump and a Justice Department lawyer were planning to oust the Attorney General and try to force Georgia to invalidate Joe Biden’s win there.

Some notes from the right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol: Black police officers described the racism they faced and heard during the assault, while members of several well-known hate groups were spotted among the rioters. A non-participant who was in the crowd documented what he saw in words and pictures. The farthest-right groups are trying to use Telegram to further radicalize new recruits disaffected by Biden’s win – perhaps some of the QAnon adherents in “disarray” after their long-awaited Storm never happened.

One of Delaware’s Senators, Chris Coons (D), argued in the New York Times that we need to hold Trump accountable for encouraging the terrorists through his words and tweets.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has lied to the public about many things in his very short life, and the latest is that he’s been lying about being a contender for the Paralympics in wheelchair racing.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has been lying about having experience as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why in the actual fuck did the federal government give PPP money to anti-vaccine groups in the middle of a pandemic?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an intelligent person and he’s wasted it backing Trump.

The Washington Post looks at the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, which helped crack the secret of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, and their unorthodox methods.

The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery among their rush to kill as many prisoners as they could before Trump left office, in spite of her documented history as a victim of horrendous sexual and physical abuse. (Trigger warning.)

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has stayed in power for 35 years, despite frequent claims of oppression, malfeasance, even spending international debt relief on a private jet. He appears to have won re-election this week, although his main opponent claims there was voter fraud.

Slate has an argument of why Parler getting wiped off the internet is bad for everyone. I don’t agree, but it’s a thought-provoking read.

Twitter bots have become a major source of disinformation on climate change, just as Pres. Biden has made fighting climate change a core policy.

I really liked the documentary Boys State, which is only available on Apple TV+, and one of the main participants wrote about attending the event in a New York Times editorial.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for the worker placement game Darwin’s Journey ends in five days.

Umbra Via, which won an award for unpublished games in 2019, is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus.

Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter for two new two-player games, Illumination and The Road to Canterbury.

Bézier Games posted a look at their games due out early in 2021.

Quined restarted its Kickstarter for the new game Carnegie, which looks like a heavy economic and routebuilding game from the designer of Troyes.

Casual Game Revolution is holding voting for the best casual game of 2020, with the candidates My City, Calico, and Back to the Future: Back in Time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, climate change, links, longreads, social media, the swamp, vaccines

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