virginia

→ January 17, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had three pieces this week, on the Cubs’ signing of Alex Bregman, the Yankees’ trade for Ryan Weathers, and the three-team trade between the Rays, Reds, and Angels. I am primarily working on the prospect rankings, which are scheduled to start running on January 26^th.

For the AV Club, I reviewed Iliad, a fantastic new two-player game from Reiner Knizia that made my top ten for 2025.

I am about to hit send on the next edition of my free email newsletter. It was almost done, then I set it aside for a moment, which turned into five days.

I have many links this week to pieces in the New York Times, which I often do because I assume many of you have access to those with your Athletic subscriptions (if you have the bundle). I believe the Times in general produces some of the best journalism in the country. I do not endorse all of the views printed in the paper; I just work there.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The outgoing governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin (R), and the board that oversees the University of Virginia appear to have rushed through the appointment of a new President, even though that candidate, Scott Beardsley, appears to have fabricated or embellished large parts of his resume, according to the Augusta Free Press. After that ran, over 200 faculty members signed a letter to the board saying that the appointment should not stand.

The so-called “peace” deal between Israel and Gaza is a fiction, as Israel continues to demolish Gaza one building at a time, according to a New York Times investigative report.

The Times also profiled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has chosen to fight back against Republicans’ attacks on the public-radio institution and even taken the Trump Administration to court, although some other public-radio figures disagree with her tactics.

America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, published a scathing piece on the attempts by the Administration and its toadies to demonize murder victim Renee Nicole Good, just as the Reagan Administration did with the four nuns raped and killed by the right-wing government of El Salvador in 1980.

The Texas Observer exposed four businesses operating in North Texas with ties to the neo-Nazi Patriot Front.

The Trump Administration demanded that UPenn send them detailed personal information on all Jewish professors, students, and staff members. If this doesn’t make you think of Nazi Germany, I really can’t help you.

The suspect in the arson attack against a Mississippi synagogue told the judge at his arraignment that “Jesus Christ is Lord” and said to investigators that the building was “a synagogue of Satan.” So who radicalized him? Can we deport him to Vatican City?

Those “alt” government accounts on social media that popped up during Trump’s first term always looked like grifters, not actual government employees trying to leak information. The Alt National Park Service one is the worst of the lot, and certainly not authentic in any sense of the word.

A new documentary looks at Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, a celebrity chef from the days prior to social media who turned out to be a serial sexual predator who likely assaulted dozens of young boys.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal exposes how RFK Jr. is cozying up to supplement makers, who peddle unproven and sometimes dangerous remedies that aren’t subject to the same safety and efficacy requirements as prescription medicines.

A white nationalist who praised the Nazis’ use of concentration camps has flipped from Republican to Democrat to try to capture a Congressional seat in California. Kyle Langford posted a picture of himself last year at Auschwitz and called it his “0% unemployment plan.”

I came across this March 2025 story from the Times about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, as I saw they have a new album, Liturgy of Death, coming out in February. The article is a heck of a read, and treats the band – who have released just seven albums over 35 years due to suicide, murder, controversies (to put it mildly), breakups – as a sort of counterculture icon. It doesn’t mention that at least one of the current members, longtime drummer Hellhammer has voiced indisputably racist and homophobic views, which I find very hard to understand given that it’s hardly a secret.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, california, gaza, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, Music, scams, social media, virginia

→ August 25, 2025
→ By keith

Chincoteague eats (and more).

I was off last week on PTO, and headed to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, with my wife, stepdaughters, and another family of four (a family we know, just in case you were concerned), renting a house there near the tiny “downtown.” The hurricane kept us away from the beach most of the week, but I was impressed by the life on the island, including the sheer number of food options with almost no chains of any sort.

The best food we ate on the island came from Pico Taqueria, which is a take-out stand like the majority of food spots on the island. I tried the fried fish taco, the seared shrimp taco, and the roasted cauliflower taco, the last of which had the most flavor, with a briny pico de gallo with capers, garlicky mayo, and fried shallots. The rice and beans, which contained bacon, were well-seasoned and properly cooked, although I didn’t get any bacon flavor from it.

Our one meal out at a restaurant was at The Pearl, a seafood-focused restaurant on the Assateague Channel, so you get a view of the national park while you eat. The seafood was good to very good, although I was disappointed that the crab cakes didn’t contain any lump crab meat, so they had a higher ratio of breading to crab than they should have given where the restaurant is. The best item we got was the raw Chincoteague oysters, which are salty and briny enough to eat without the included cocktail sauce or anything more than a bit of lemon juice. Don’t bother getting a mixed drink, though.

Cosa Pizza is a wood-fired pizza truck that promises “a modern twist on … the original Neapolitan thin crust.” I liked their pizza quite a bit but it’s well-removed from Neapolitan, as their dough isn’t that airy and they must cook at a lower temperature, getting a lot of browning around the outer crust without the charred spots that are characteristic of Neapolitan.

Island Creamery has a couple of locations on the Delmarva peninsula, one of which is in Salisbury, Maryland, about 10-12 minutes from the Shorebirds’ ballpark. They make their own ice cream and the flavors are strong – I’ve had the Java Jolt, dark coffee ice cream with brownie chunks and chocolate-covered espresso beans, and Marsh Mud, very dark chocolate ice cream. I’d go there over the BYOC (Build Your Own Cookie) stand, where you pick one of seven cookie flavors, then get it served warm with a scoop of Hersheys ice cream and a topping for a little under $8.

I only had coffee out once, at Amarin, a café and bakery right on Maddox just over the bridge from the mainland. They roast their own coffee at a roastery you’ll probably pass driving towards Chincoteague, but everything is medium-dark or darker, which just isn’t my preference. If you’re more into Starbucks-style coffee drinks, it’s a great option – and there’s no chain coffee on the island, other than McDonald’s if you want to count that – but I like lighter roasts.

Church Street Produce is a small produce stand with baked goods, including homemade pies for (I think) $23 for a full-sized one and $8 for a mini pie. We cooked a good bit while in the rental house, and I picked up a few vegetables here – the selection is small but extremely high-quality.

In non-food activities, Old Neptune’s Bookshop is a cute and very well-curated used bookstore, where just about everything is $9 and up but most books are in excellent shape. It’s in part of a house, which is true of a lot of shops and cafes on the island, right on Maddox, not far from Amarin. There’s no parking here but for now there’s an unoccupied food lot across the street where you can park. I bought four books there and could easily have bought three times that.

The main beach is on Assateague Island, in the national park, although there was no swimming permitted in the ocean while we were there because of strong rip currents that were exacerbated by Hurricane Erin. We did get to swim in Tom’s Cove, which you can access from the same parking lot that serves the main beach, where we could walk most of the way out and only be waist-deep. It’s a smaller beach, but it was way better for the kids. You’ll need a park pass to access any of this, along with the walk to the lighthouse, the drivable wildlife loop, and the various hiking and bike trails.

We don’t usually go to the same place twice, but if circumstances brought me back to Chincoteague, I wouldn’t mind. Nothing was more than 15 minutes from the house; most of the food options were less than 7 minutes away. If we were bike people, we probably could have ditched the car for everything but the trip to the beach. I would take this over the Outer Banks, based on our trip there last year, since this was half the distance from our house and the fact that there was so much less driving involved once we got there.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: beaches, bookstores, chincoteague, ice cream, pizza, seafood, tacos, virginia

→ August 31, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/31/24.

I’m back to work this week, having gone to Delmarva on Wednesday night to catch Boston’s latest teenaged phenom, Franklin Arias, and will have a long scouting notebook up in a day or two covering that and three other games I haven’t written up yet. I’m a little at odds and ends for next week, as it looks like the schedules of the local teams are pretty unfavorable, and I may have to wait and see on the playoffs.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Rock Hard 1977, designed by Jackie Fuchs, a four-time Jeopardy! champion who happened to be the bassist for the influential rock band the Runaways under the name Jackie Fox. It’s fantastic, and spurred me to rank my five favorite thematic board games (meaning games where the theme is great and well-integrated with game play).

I’ve been holding off on a newsletter until that review went up, so I’ll try to get one out this weekend. You can sign up for free in eager anticipation.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Brandon Anderson founded a group dedicated to abolishing the police, only to siphon funds from it to pay for luxury travel and clothing for himself. The employee who caught him was faced with a dilemma: Report her boss to the very police they were trying to abolish, or let him continue to defraud supporters?

“The truth is that Staten Island kind of sucks.” I’d argue that’s half-right; Staten Island just sucks. It’s the worst of the five boroughs, lacking the culture or diversity of the other four – and it doesn’t have the subway. New York should just hand it to New Jersey. The two states should build a bridge from Jersey City straight to Brooklyn. But this Baffler longread argues that it sucks because it’s Trumpy and xenophobic, and that there are other “little Staten Islands” around the rest of the city, too. And now they’re talking about seceding from the rest of the city on which they depend for their financial existence.

Here’s more on Trump’s plans for a second term as detailed by Project 2025, with notes on the just-released videotapes that describe how Trump has been to the organization’s offices and “blessed” the project, and vaccine developer Paul Offit’s piece on how damaging Project 2025 would be to public health.

A new pre-print found that sports betting led to higher credit card balances, reduced net investment, and more spending on the lottery, with the effects stronger among “financially constrained households.” That is, introducing sports betting in a state/city disproportionately impacts the poor – those who can least afford the losses and negative externalities associated with gambling.

The City of Philadelphia released a farcical economic “study” that purports to show that building a new sports arena in Chinatown will benefit the city even though the 76ers already play in a perfectly usable facility that doesn’t require destroying a historic neighborhood and displacing residents.

The city of St. Petersburg suspended its HR director for approving $250,000 in bonuses for city employees involving in the boondoggle of helping fund a new stadium for the Rays. The city has since rescinded the bonuses.

Defector has an excellent piece on the toxic nature of modern fandom and how it has already driven Chappell Roan to threaten to quit music.

Falun Gong, the Chinese cult that produces the right-wing fountain of false information known as the Epoch Times, has gradually taken over a small town in upstate New York … and the residents aren’t exactly up in arms about it.

Once upon a time, Chipotle was the “good” fast-food outlet, trying to use better quality ingredients and cultivate relationships with farmers, but ultimately, the profit motive has won out – they’ve been accused of denying raises to unionized workers at a Michigan location in violation of federal law.

Lionsgate put out a trailer for the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis that included a bunch of fake quotes from movie critics blasting some of the director’s older and more acclaimed movies. Megalopolis looks like it’s going to be a giant disaster, after mostly bad reviews at Cannes and multiple stumbles already from the studio and the director.

Turning Point, the right-wing group headed by Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, is spending millions of dollars in swing state Wisconsin to support Donald Trump.

The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr writes of how Elon Musk helped incite the racist riots in the U.K. – and may very well plan to do the same here this fall. At their sister publication, the Guardian, Robert Reich suggests six ways to try to reduce Musk’s power.

Dozens of fake accounts on Twitter used photos of real women in Europe to pose as Trump supporters and post right-wing propaganda, according to a study from CNN.

Meanwhile, Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative jurist appointed by President George H.W. Bush, endorsed Kamala Harris for President while calling Trump’s candidacy an existential threat to our democracy.

Tom Nichols excoriates the ongoing decline of the conservatives who threw in their lot with Trump – including Rich Lowry, who published an editorial in the New York Times claiming Trump could win the election on “character.”

Ohio Republicans, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be some of the worst enemies of democracy, have approved language for an anti-gerrymandering ballot question that is designed to confuse voters into voting their way. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who voted seven times to use district maps that were ruled unconstitutional by courts, drafted the confusing language.

Why is Missouri using taxpayer money to subsidize an anti-abortion group that operates in Illinois and beyond? Missourians have helped fund Coalition for Life and similar nonprofits with over $11 million in tax credits, much of which now flows out of state.

Arkansas banned abortion and touts itself as “pro-life,” but has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, which sure sounds like a preventable problem if life was something they actually cared about.

A cop in Massachusetts raped a girl he met through the state’s program for kids interested in law enforcement careers and then murdered her when she became pregnant, according to charges filed last week. The article I linked refers to “sex acts” before the victim, Sandra Birchmore, was 16 years old, but doesn’t use the correct word for it: rape. This is statutory rape and we need to stop normalizing it by avoiding the term.

A Republican judge in North Carolina is refusing to recuse himself from two cases involving his father. That ought to be an impeachable offense.

Fox News is touting RFK Jr’s endorsement of Trump despite his history of lying about vaccines, which helped kill 83, mostly kids, and sicken thousands in a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2018.

Mainstream news outlets complaining about the DNC’s credentialing of over 200 content creators are authoring their own extinction, according to Mark Jacob, whose newsletter covers the way right-wing propagandists have run rings around the MSM. Jacob argues that journalists need to refocus on real journalism, like investigative pieces, now that the subjects can often go around them to talk directly to their audiences/customers.

For example, the New York Times’s Edgar Sandoval reports on dubious “voter fraud raids” conducted in Texas against Latino Democrats, an apparent attempt at voter intimidation by Texas AG Ken Paxton.

A conservative alumni group at the University of Virginia has pressured the school into suspending campus tours given by a student-run service because they talked about how Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and raped them. Really.
The denialist group Biosafety Now, which continues to push the debunked lab-leak theory and includes a wide number of prominent anti-vaxxers, has added economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose advice to then-President Trump on the pandemic was disastrous, to its board. This same group has worked closely with Republicans in Congress to push false claims that China is responsible for creating SARS-CoV-2 and should be held responsible for damages.

Bhattacharya is also organizing a forum at Stanford for COVID minimizers and denialists, including those who called for wide infection to achieve herd immunity and architects of other fiascos like Sweden’s hands-off approach. Stanford’s new President will even speak at the event.

The Kickstarter for Everdell Duo, a two-player version of one of my favorite games of all time, has 12 days left to run and has already raised over $280,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arkansas, coronavirus, cults, denialism, gambling, links, longreads, Media, missouri, movies, new york city, ohio, police, project 2025, social media, stadium scams, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ November 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/19/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote two pieces this week, one on the Angels’ signing of Tyler Anderson and the Yankees’ re-signing of Anthony Rizzo, and one on four trades from earlier this week before teams had to set their 40-man rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, about the book and what we might do to make being a working mother easier in the U.S. You can pre-order her book, which is due out December 6^th, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With Twitter imploding, you can find me in a bunch of other places, including Facebook, Instagram, counter.social, and cohost, as well as here and on my free email newsletter, which went out again yesterday. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Population projections have the stretch of West African coastline that runs from Lagos, Nigeria, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, becoming the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth by 2100, with about 500 million people in it. The Guardian looks at what this means for the region, its people, and the planet as a whole.
Clint Smith’s story in the Atlantic on his visits to Holocaust memorial sites and what they might tell us about how to grapple with our own shameful past is one of the best things you’ll read this year.
And this New York Times Magazine article on the theft of an Afghan baby by a network of American evangelical Christians should win a Pulitzer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but we should not be in the practice of stealing babies from countries we invade.
The United States lags badly behind other developed nations in researching and preventing stillbirths. We still have 20,000 stillbirths every year in the U.S., and at least a quarter of them are (likely) preventable.
A woman visiting Ohio had a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. Because of Ohio’s anti-abortion law, the emergency room sent her home to wait because they couldn’t “prove there was no fetal development.” This is how these religiously-motivated laws will kill women.
I was obsessed with the computer game Age of Empires when it first came out in the late 1990s. WIRED has an interview with the current CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the head of the studio that makes the Age games as the game celebrates its 25^th anniversary and two new civilizations were added to the most recent version, Age of Empires IV.
ProPublica has the inside story of how anti-abortion groups helped write Tennessee’s extremely strict ban on the medical procedure and are working to defend it.
Colombia faces a difficult challenge as its new President wants to stop extracting fossil fuels and move to climate-friendly energy sources, including the lack of a transition plan for affected workers.
This 12-minute BBC podcast looks at online harassment and threats against scientists investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The CARES Act led to the release of 11,000 inmates from federal prisons during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 17 reoffended. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we spend nearly $200 billion just to keep people in prison. Maybe we should rethink this?
A new research paper in Nature found evidence that climate change is increasing the risk of bat pathogens spilling over into humans.
Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, and wrote an op ed explaining why he quit a few weeks after Elon Musk took over the site. It’s not good, but it also explains how the company’s dependence on advertisers may prevent Musk from turning it into 8chan. Roth himself has some bigoted tweets from 10+ years ago.
Eighteen unvaccinated Ohio children, all but one under the age of 5, have contracted measles in an ongoing outbreak across two day care facilities. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, and it can cause death up to ten years after the infection from a progressive and incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
More anti-vax loons are demanding “vaccine-free” blood and are trying to set up so-called “safe” blood banks.
Meanwhile, America’s Frontline Doctors, a quack group that took in millions from prescribing useless COVID-19 treatments and offering online “consultations,” is imploding now because founder and January 6^th insurrectionist Simone Gold may have been embezzling the group’s funds for personal gain.
Also, it appears that someone contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite in Arizona. Climate change makes this almost inevitable.
Tucker Carlson’s attempt to play kingmaker this election season ended mostly with embarrassing defeats.
It’s a weak substitute for the real thing, but Democrats should codify Roe v. Wade right now, and force SCOTUS – with five justices who are religious zealots or otherwise openly anti-abortion – to grapple with it, according to The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
Mystal also wrote elsewhere about how Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the House to his fellow Republicans by gutting voting rights laws.
Tom Scocca writes that Trump’s hold on the GOP is stronger than ever despite the drubbing many of his preferred candidates took in the midterms.
The Virginia state education department has proposed major changes to social studies standards, written by five new appointees of the state’s Republican governor. Educators oppose the changes, calling them jingoistic and derogatory towards non-whites.
Moms for Liberty, the astroturfing, pro-white/anti-LGBT activist group that’s been targeting school board elections, threw out a Black superintendent in South Carolina and banned critical race theory
A Connecticut school district is so wedded to its racist mascot (the Redmen) that they’re forgoing $94,000 in state funding just to keep it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is shipping more migrants to Philadelphia in another instance of human trafficking, but the government of the City of Brotherly Love has posted a list of resources for folks who want to help welcome these new residents. Love > hate.
And Texas Republicans have filed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors – yes, putting parents in prison for getting medical care for their kids. Why is MLB putting the All-Star Game there?
The Biden Administration is giving Saudi Arabian “Prime Minister” Mohammed bin Salman immunity from a lawsuit filed by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because oil.
All the news about Republicans investimigrating Hunter Biden’s laptop or something is overshadowing the real damage they’re going to do by going after science agencies.
Board game news: Pandasaurus Games owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair face accusations from former employees of creating a toxic workplace environment through “negligence, mismanagement, and manipulation.” I have met Molly and Nathan, although I can’t say I know either of them well, and I’ve reviewed many Pandasaurus Games over the years. The company denied the allegations and their response is at the bottom of the linked article.
Tabriz, the new game from the co-designer of the amazing Cascadia, is crowdfunding on Gamefound for two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, anti-science, board game news, carceral state, colombia, links, longreads, measles, philadelphia, scotus, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games, virginia

→ November 5, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/5/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 free agents in this year’s class, and held a Q&A about it that afternoon. Based on my Twitter replies, a lot of people looked at the raw rankings without reading any of the content. Good times!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Menand host of the podcast Visible Women. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Last week’s roundup went up late because of all the sportsball going on over the weekend, so I’m relinking it here for folks who missed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Writing for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter looks at the rise in early puberty for American girls and what it might mean for them in the short- and long-term. She also explores the complex reasons why this trend increased during the pandemic.
A ProPublica/Texas Tribune joint investigation shed more light on the botched police response in Uvalde.
The Intercept ran a widely shared story about the Department of Homeland Security collaborating with tech companies to suppress (dis)information, but TechDirt writer Mike Masnick says the story is “absolute garbage.”
Have you seen the “stop the insanity” or “anti-white bigotry” ads running during the MLB playoffs? Both are funded by dark-money groups founded and run by former Trump officials, including Stephen Miller. They’re bullshit, notably the first one’s claims about crime being out of control – crime is way down from the 1990s.
John Leguizamo wrote an open letter to Hollywood about the continued lack of opportunities for Latinx actors on screen, in spite of growing evidence that movies and shows built around such actors and characters do well financially. The same argument applies to Black or Asian actors.
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, one of the worst and most vocal anti-vaxxers online for at least a decade, is now, finally under investigation by the Ohio medical board for her ridiculous testimony before that state’s legislature where she claimed COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, among other falsehoods.
So much content on Elon Musk’s flailing takeover of Twitter, from how he’s backing down on promises and kowtowing to regulators to a massive drop in advertisers to a badly botched mass layoff to a class-action lawsuit because the layoff violated California law. And that’s without getting into this silly Twitter Blue program, that misunderstands the part where verifying users benefits Twitter, not the other way around.
Musk also shot himself in the foot by retweeting a false right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, which Musk later deleted, but not before amplifying it to his huge follower base.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who campaigned on the bogus pretense that critical race theory was being taught in the state’s elementary schools, set up a tip line for parents to rat out schools that were teaching stuff they didn’t like. Parents instead used it to report actual violations of their rights, such as the denial of special education requests, including services and evaluations.
Countries in the Middle East are happily selling oil to the world while shifting to cleaner energy sources themselves. They know you don’t get high on your own supply.
Dr. Oz had a paper rejected in 2003 over questions about the strength of the data he used to reach his conclusions, earning a two-year ban from publishing in that same journal – an unusually harsh punishment.
The Slay the Spire board game Kickstarter has raised over $2 million already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, guns, links, longreads, ohio, oil, pennsylvania, privacy, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia

→ July 31, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/31/21.

I had a lot of content this week around the trade deadline for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

The Cubs’ four main deals on Friday (Báez, Bryant, Kimbrel, Marisnick)
The Phillies/Rangers trade
The Toronto trade for José Bérrios
The Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade
The Yankees’ trade for Anthony Rizzo
The Yankees’ trade for Joey Gallo
The Starling Marte/Jesús Luzardo trade (also includes three Pirates trades and the Andrew Chafin deal)

I also wrote up my notes from a game between the Yankees’ and Pirates’ AA affiliates. I was planning to do a chat but the pace of trades made that impossible.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Slate‘s Josh Levin, talking about his One Year: 1977 podcast episode about baseball broadcaster Mary Shane and his book The Queen. You can subscribe on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Whistle Mountain, a medium-heavy worker placement game from the designer of the train game Whistle Stop.

I returned to my email newsletter, with a note on why I’ve been absent from there and largely from here over the last six weeks. Also, my second book The Inside Game is out in paperback and available from bookshop.org or wherever you buy books.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Olympian Emily Infeld’s three-year nightmare with a stalker highlights just how poorly our society handles this kind of threat.
An anti-trans Instagram account posted a fabricated story about a spa in Los Angeles, leading to weeks of death threats and real violence.
Ed Yong detailed the incredible results of an experiment to make mosquitoes immune to the dengue virus by using the Wolbachia bacterium.
The critical race theory non-troversy has caused a huge schism in a Michigan town where high school students conducted a “slave auction” of their Black classmates.
The preprint that COVID deniers like to tout that claims that ivermectin is effective against the virus? It’s been withdrawn due to a major data integrity issue.
The home of a fraudster who has been pushing a bleach “cure” for autism has been raided by German authorities.
A marketing agency tried to pay YouTubers to spread anti-vaccine propaganda, but the influencers wouldn’t play ball. No one knows who was actually behind the plot.
I know you’re shocked, but the Trump Administration handed out big federal contracts to its political allies during the pandemic, often breaching the rules to do so.
The man who owned the @tennessee Twitter handle refused to sell it, so a 20-year-old who wanted the handle ‘swatted’ the man, who then had a fatal heart attack during the incident.
A survivor of the Parkland high school shooting wrote about how his own father thinks the massacre was a hoax, thanks to the QAnon community.
A state inquiry ruled that the Maltese government was responsible for the death of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who exposed corruption in the island nation that went all the way up to the Prime Minister. Galizia was murdered in 2017 when someone set off a bomb in her car.
Why is the Biden Administration allowing a pilot program where federal prisoners would only receive scans of personal mail, rather than the originals? Several states use this program and also charge prisoners a fee for each scan.
Missouri has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, and the effects of the right-wing disinformation campaign are evident in area hospitals.
A Houston Chronicle editorial said aspects of a new Texas anti-abortion law “are what we might expect from the lowest intellects in the Taliban.”
Virginia’s pro-Trump Republican party has gone after a University of Virginia professor for his tweets criticizing Trump.
The BBC explains how Hall & Oates’ 1980 pop song “You Make My Dreams” became a streaming hit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: conspiracy theories, links, longreads, missouri, racism, science, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia

→ April 20, 2021
→ By keith

Charlottesville eats.

On my way out of Charlottesville to drive home, I stopped at The Fitzroy, a gastropub in the city’s Downtown Mall, to grab dinner for the road. I went with their roasted broccolini and mozzarella sandwich, served on ciabatta with lightly roasted cherry tomatoes and basil pesto, which turned out tob exactly what I wanted – filling but not heavy, with a huge quantity of the star broccolini, which were roasted deeply enough to get some color and caramelization on them. The menu is small but has plenty of options for carnivores and vegetarians, and apparently they make their own tonic water for G&Ts, which I’d love to try when I’m not facing a 220-mile drive.

Al Carbon is a fast-casual Peruvian chicken place up Seminole Trail about 3 miles north of campus, serving the standards of that cuisine as well as some Mexican-inspired dishes like elote, esquites, and cemitas. I went with the basics – a quarter dark with maduros (fried sweet plantains) and elote con mayonesa (corn on the cob, rolled in mayo, cotija cheese, chile powder, and lime zest). The chicken was good but the least interesting thing I ate; it was still juicy but the bulk of the flavor was on the skin, not in the meat. The plantains were absurdly good, slightly crispy and chewy at the edges, but bordering on custardy at the center, while the elote was spicier than what I’m using to having in that dish, but in a good way. Al Carbon also shares a parking lot with a Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard stand, if you’re so inclined. I was.

MarieBette is a small French bakery that the internet told me does great breakfast sandwiches, which seemed like an ideal thing to eat on the go. Their croissants are divine, flaky and buttery with barely enough flour to hold the whole thing together, and I definitely ate it while it was still too hot. They do a full coffee service as well, but I skipped that to go check out JBird Supply, a small coffee micro-roaster with a shop in a shared office space that serves pour-over, drip, and espresso options from a small selection of their own beans. They seem to focus on small growers who provide for their workers or communities, whether it’s Uganda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, or anywhere else where they source their beans. I tried their Ethiopia Sidamo as a pour-over, which was less overtly citrusy than the typical Ethiopian coffee, and picked up a bag of beans from the Gorilla Summit station in southwestern Uganda, near the border with Rwanda. The latter have a powerful black cherry aroma the moment you open the bag, and the coffee from it has the same note but with some nuttier undertones.

I didn’t get to visit my favorite dinner spot in Charlottesville, Mas Tapas, as its hours conflicted with the game time Friday and I wanted to hit the road as soon as I could on Saturday. I did get a quick to-go meal from Moe’s Original BBQ right near the UVA stadium; it’s a regional chain of passable barbeque, but I think their collard greens are very good, just spicy enough, salty but not too much so, and their ‘marinated slaw’ is vinegar-based rather than mayo-based, which I prefer. You can do better in Charlottesville if you have the time, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: breakfast, charlottesville, coffee, peruvian cuisine, virginia

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

→ February 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/2/19.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this week, with four separate pieces: #1 through #50, #51 through #100, my column of fourteen more guys who just missed, and a ranking of the top 20 prospects just for impact in 2019. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday and a Periscope video chat on Thursday.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems will run on Monday, February 4th, after which the team by team reports will run, one division per day for the following six days. I’ve written 24 of the 30 team reports so far, if you’re curious.

Many thanks to the White Sox blog SouthSideSox and writer katiesphil for this lovely review of Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

The best thing I read this week was the New Yorker‘s profile of Nashville’s iconic Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack and current owner André Prince Jeffries. It’s a wonderful piece that touches on questions of culinary authenticity as well as the intersection of race, food, and access to money.
A close second is this Atavist story on a nearly-blind man in Texas who robbed a bank so he could get health care, a story that combines a profile of him – he also lost a foot to the effects of type 2 diabetes – and our very broken social safety net.
A woman attacked by a serial groper in DC found out he was a chef at a popular restaurant she’d visited, so she fought back by spreading word among city restaurants about his history of assaults.
Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) examined voting records of state employees, job applicants, and political rivals, which may have contributed to her decision not to run for Governor next year. She called the ProPublica report a “sexist smear job.”
Self-styled activist Kevin Powell nearly ruined a woman’s life over a matter of mistaken identity, running an actual smear campaign against someone who shared the same name as someone who’d send his wife a critical email. Powell, who appeared on the inaugural season of MTV’s The Real World, has faced multiple accusations of assaulting women, and lost a lawsuit in this case during which he plugged his ears with his fingers to avoid hearing the judge’s ruling, and then claimed he was being targeted because of his race.
Washington state legislators are pushing to end nonmedical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws – as every damn state should by now – and of course anti-vaxxers are fighting back. These deniers – not skeptics, as I told the author on twitter, because skeptics want evidence, while anti-vaxxers reject evidence – are loud, so those of us on the side of science need to be louder.
Arizona is backsliding even in the face of measles outbreaks, with Republicans there introducing two bills that will reduce vaccination rates, one making it easier to opt out, one that would force medical professionals to explain vaccination “risks” to parents. (Here’s the main risk: you might be a little sore at the injection site.)
California did tighten its laws, but now many doctors are selling bogus “medical exemptions” to insane parents who’d rather break the law than protect their children from deadly diseases. This should be grounds to revoke a doctor’s license to practice medicine.
The Oregonian ran an editorial advocating eliminating nonmedical exemptions there and otherwise pushing pro-vaccination policies. If you live in any of these states, call your state rep and senator and tell them both you favor laws that end all nonmedical exemptions (religious or philosophical) for schoolchildren, and want sanctions against doctors who help parents skirt the rules.
Police failed to file charges in a 2013 rape case in Eastland, Texas, allowing the rapist to remain free so he could rape and nearly kill an 11-year-old girl. Worse: One of the officers who screwed up the original case, Frank Saylors, won election as city commissioner of Eastland in 2015.
The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, didn’t like that the city-funded historical magazine had a piece about Henry Ford’s (well-documented) history of anti-Semitism, so he fired the longtime editor and refused to let the magazine distribute the issue. Of course, it has already backfired, with the story making national news.
I can’t imagine you missed this but Virginia Governor Ralph Northam needs to step down.
Top Chef alum Fatima Ali died of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, last week.
Is there a connection between gum disease and Alzheimer’s? If you need me, I’ll be flossing my teeth.
GQ ran a guide to dating someone with serious food allergies.
A reader passed along this story of members of indie-folk band Murder by Death opening a Neapolitan pizzeria in Louisville.
The efforts of a single evangelical woman in Virginia just derailed the Equal Rights Amendment again. Of course, she’s white and highly privileged, so she can’t understand why such an amendment would be beneficial.
The EPA named a climate change denier to its advisory board. John Christy has argued for the repeal of regulations against greenhouse gas emissions because he claims (against all evidence) that their effects will be positive.
Two St. Louis cops decided to play Russian roulette with one bullet in the revolver, so of course one of them is now dead.
Also from St. Louis, the Riverfront Times details how the FBI outsmarted the violent cops who beat protesters in the wake of the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on murder charges.
Public transport in Vienna has boomed thanks to a broad-based combination of increased geographic coverage, pricing strategies, regulations, and support from the federal level.
Mohanad Elshieky, who is in the U.S. legally, had a terrifying interaction with overzealous ICE agents, whom Greyhound allows to board its buses for these so-called “checks.”
My friend Emma Span wrote an advice column for Mother Goose characters over at Slate.
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and the Forbidden cooperative game series, has a new title coming this year called Era: Medieval Age, a “roll and build” title inspired by Roll Through the Ages.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, california, climate change, kentucky, links, longreads, louisville, mass transit, metoo, nashville, pizza, top chef, vaccines, virginia

→ October 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/20/18.

My first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League went up for ESPN+ subscribers this week, covering Forrest Whitley, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Julio Pablo Martinez, and more. I’ll file another, likely longer report this weekend.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the Spiel des Jahres-nominated cooperative game The Mind, where all players have to try to play all their hand cards to the table in ascending order – but without communicating with each other at all.

I’ll be at the Manheim Library in Manheim, PA, on Monday, October 22nd, to talk about Smart Baseball and sign copies of the book (which will be available for purchase there too).

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. If you don’t get it, you don’t know what you’re missing.

And now, the links…

The most important read of the week is the late Jamal Khashoggi’s final column for the Washington Post, on the need for more freedom of expression in the Arab world. He was killed by Saudi intelligence agents shortly after writing it.
Longreads (and longish reads): Graduate student Urmila Mahadev appears to have solved the verification problem in quantum computing, a major unsolved problem in the theoretical field where researchers lacked a method of knowing if a quantum computer had actually carried our your instructions.
Evangelical writer Jen Hatmaker has built a following through her books and popular blog on her faith and family. Her recent turn into political writing, on how Trump and his supporters are acting contrary to Christian beliefs and teachings, has earned her both praise and vitriol, including death threats.
Popular Mechanics spoke to nine scientists running for Congress this year across the country.
This obituary of a 30-year-old woman who died as a result of an opiate addiction, written by her parents, is crushing, and a good reminder of the humanity of people who fall prey to this increasingly common disease.
The two surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, have a new book coming out on the band’s history; Vulture has an excerpt on the mis-marketing of Paul’s Boutique.
CityLab examines why public transit works better outside the United States and tackles a few common myths. Most interesting to me: The example of Toronto’s supra-municipal authority considering the needs of the city and the suburbs when building mass transit, and the examples of European cities building bus or metro stations first and developing urban and suburban areas around them. Also, Nashville: WTF?
Sears filed for bankruptcy after its hedge-fund investor owner bled the company of most of its valuable assets, and his recovery plan signals that he’d like to continue to do so.
The Republican Party is coming after Social Security and Medicare as they try to solve the budget deficit, a crisis utterly of their own making due to tax cuts and military spending.
Racism drove white voters to switch to Trump, not economic anxiety. Try not to have a heart attack and die from not surprise.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke failed to disclose his partial ownership of a weapons manufacturer, which creates several conflicts of interest with policy areas of his day job. You’d think that would get him removed from his post, but in this Administration, it’s just his way of fitting in.
Nevada Sen. Dean Heller (guess) pushed the VA to use an unproven and likely fraudulent ‘brain wave’ treatment for PTSD sufferers, because the company offering it has a connection to one of his senior aides.
Virginia Rep. Dave Brat (guess) told a recovering addict that he understood the latter’s troubles because he’s been targeted by negative campaign ads by his opponent. Totally the same thing.
Someone stole a Seattle homeless woman’s car, which was her only shelter at the time, after which it was found and towed. The towing company refused to return it to her, then sold it for $175, then bought it back on a judge’s order but charged her for storing it. She finally got it back after a year of fighting, although the towing company – which is the official towing company of the city of Seattle – claims she owes them over $21,000 in fees.
The conservative Weekly Standard asks why Iowans keep returning white nationalist Steve King to Congress. The Des Moines Register endorsed Democratic candidates across the state, arguing that Republicans have failed in their opportunities at the helms of our federal and state governments while obstructing attempts to stop corruption and collusion with foreign powers.
Coloradans concerned about the deleterious environmental effects of fracking should vote yes on Proposition 112, which would require a buffer zone between fracking sites and schools or water sources like underground aquifers. John Elway recorded a vague TV ad for the oil & gas companies fighting it.
Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have recommended 31 papers co-authored by a former lab director be retracted because he fabricated or falsified data.
Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has led to a twenty-year decline in vaccination rates, won this year’s Rusty Razor award for bad science. Indeed, the percentage of toddlers in the U.S. who have received zero vaccinations keeps rising.
The state of Arizona had to cancel a parent vaccination education course after negative feedback from about 120 parents, many of whom admitted they hadn’t even seen the course information. Vaccination levels are especially low among Arizona kindergarteners, to the point that the state’s schoolchildren are below herd immunity levels.
A pair of low-level Republican Party employees in Arizona tried to donate to state Democrats in the name of a fictional Communist party.
They’re not the only terrible people in the Arizona Republican Party: Debbie Lesko, who won a special election to replace Trent Franks in the House of Representatives this spring, is flat-out lying about her opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, in a new campaign ad. Lesko’s district includes a lot of retirees, who ought to be concerned about the GOP’s plans (mentioned above) to cut Social Security and Medicare.
A group of 21 Democratic lawmakers wants to know why the Administration is cozying up to the neo-Nazi government of Hungary, including cancelling a planned grant to support independent media in the former Soviet bloc nation, which has lurched to the right by electing an openly anti-Semitic leader.
Voter suppression in Georgia got more literal this week as county officials ordered 40 black senior citizens off a bus taking them to vote. Meanwhile, a Salon examination found that Secretary of State and current GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has purged over 300,000 registered voters from Georgia’s rolls.
Kansas, seeing Georgia’s moves, said “hold my beer” and moved the lone polling station in Dodge City, which is 60% Latino to a location outside the city limits. It’s really amazing that I, a white American who has always lived in majority-white areas, have never had any difficulty finding a place to cast my ballots. So weird.
CAP Action found that Florida’s murder rate jumped after the state enacted a so-called ‘Stand Your Ground’ law in 2005.
A new study examines how easy it is to vote in all 50 states, with a ranking from 1 to 50. Oregon is first (easiest), while Mississippi, about 20 seconds removed from blowing up black churches, is 50th. I was most surprised to see three states in the Great Lakes region – Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio – all ranked in the 40s.
The Houston Chronicle endorsed Beto O’Rourke for Senate, saying his opponent, incumbent Ted Cruz, has shown “little interest in addressing the needs of his fellow Texans during his six years in office” while calling out Cruz’s unwillingness to serve as a check on the powers of the President.
Nature says that the biggest risk for a global pandemic comes from misinformation spread by denialists, such as “anti-vaxxers” and charlatans like Wakefield and others selling supplements to those made afraid of conventional medicine.
A reader sent along this link on the best new pizzerias in the state of New Jersey, some of which I will try to hit this winter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, environment, frauds, guns, hip-hop, iowa, kansas, links, physics, rap, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, virginia, voter suppression

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