{"id":9600,"date":"2022-10-29T20:54:13","date_gmt":"2022-10-30T00:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9600"},"modified":"2022-11-03T21:35:10","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T01:35:10","slug":"stick-to-baseball-10-29-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/29\/stick-to-baseball-10-29-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick to baseball, 10\/29\/22."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week \u2013 a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club<\/a>, notably their offense. I\u2019m about \u00be of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over at Paste, I reviewed the trick-taking game Cat in the Box<\/a>, which takes the Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s Cat thought experiment as its inspiration. Cards have numbers but no suits until they\u2019re played \u2013 as in, when they\u2019re observed. Apparently my review was so positive the game has sold out everywhere!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Joe Posnanski<\/a>, who helped me preview the World Series, talk a little about the highs and lows of the playoffs so far, and talk a little about free agency. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, Stitcher<\/a>, amazon<\/a>, or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can sign up for my free email newsletter<\/a> and at some point I\u2019ll send another one out. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball<\/em><\/a> or The Inside Game<\/em><\/a>, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, the links\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Longreads first: ProPublica has the best story yet on how the couplpe that owns the shipping materials behemoth U-Line uses their profits to fund all kinds of extreme right-wing causes<\/a>, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ+ laws to anti-abortion laws and more. They oppose anything that might improve workers\u2019 rights or raise taxes on the ultra-rich, too. If you get a box made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else. I\u2019ve done this many times and only once have I gotten a negative reply \u2013 and I won\u2019t do business with that company again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This Atlantic<\/em> story about a realtor in Michigan who was convinced he\u2019d cracked the state lottery\u2019s algorithm<\/a> is a great illustration of our innate tendencies to see patterns in randomness \u2013 and how we can convince ourselves of almost anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music journalist and author Caryn Rose ranked all 234 U2 songs<\/a> for Rolling Stone<\/em>. I found myself agreeing with most of the top of the list, although as someone who first encountered the band through MTV\u2019s heavy rotation of \u201cNew Year\u2019s Day,\u201d I think that one is too low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MLB.com writer Matthew Monaghan wrote a lovely piece for Travel + Leisure<\/em> on revisiting his late wife\u2019s favorite vacation spot, Bermuda<\/a>. It\u2019s a tough but beautiful read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Texas no longer requires a permit for handguns, leading to more spontaneous shootings<\/a>. It sounds like police \u2013 the blue we\u2019re supposed to back \u2013 don\u2019t seem to like this new lawless reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again, a state that decided that anyone can carry a gun without a permit, has made an activist out of one of the 10-year-old survivors<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why didn\u2019t St. Louis police take the gun<\/a> from the kid who killed a teacher and another student in a school there last week, since he failed a background check?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At The Verge, Nilay Patel writes how Elon Musk can\u2019t possibly adhere to his stated \u201cfree speech\u201d goals and run what was already a \u201cdisaster clown car company\u201d profitably<\/a>. It\u2019s not hard to agree \u2013 Twitter hasn\u2019t been growing, its ad revenues lag behind any competitors, it faces a tangle of regulations and pressure from markets where Musk\u2019s Tesla wants to grow, and the site has never figured out how to deal with harassment and abuse. I\u2019m not leaving, but I\u2019ve already been engaging less on the site, and if a viable alternative emerges I\u2019ll gladly check it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spreading on the farcical social media app Truth Social have led to actual armed idiots \u201cpatrolling\u201d around ballot boxes<\/a> to try to spot voter fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein once derided as \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d Author John Horgan writes of the beauty of this work and how it seems to defy common sense<\/a> for Scientific American<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physicist Peter Fisher gave a talk at my alma mater about the search for dark matter and the theory that WIMPs<\/a> (weakly interacting massive particles) are what make up this missing mass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Washington Post<\/em> reports on the network of people helping direct pills to terminate pregnancies<\/a> to people in states where abortion is now illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disinformation dealer Dinesh D\u2019Souza\u2019s publisher deleted defamatory details after recalling his new book 2000 Mules<\/em><\/a>, even though he\u2019d promised to name names. What a ding-dong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As President, Trump had his hotels charge the Secret Service \u2013 and thus, all of us who pay taxes \u2013 five times the maximum room rate allowed by federal law<\/a>, and then he lied about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t link to the Federalist, a disinformation-spewing site funded by the owners of U-Line, very often, but this piece arguing that conservatives should fight for stronger government and more intervention in all areas of society<\/a> certainly seems to remove the mask from the extreme right, because that is not conservatism \u2013 it\u2019s fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In good Administration news that seems to be flying under the radar, President Biden is moving to cancel a program to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile<\/a>, which wouldn\u2019t have been ready until 2035 and which the administration says is redundant with existing weapons. Some anti-nuclear weapon groups say Biden hasn\u2019t gone far enough<\/a>. The military, meanwhile, wants all the weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the parent of a teenager, I often feel like part of my job is try to reduce the stresses she faces in school and life, because we hear so much about how much stress our kids are under and I have a natural instinct to want to protect her. Psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues instead that we should teach our teenagers to embrace stress<\/a> so they\u2019re better equipped to handle it throughout their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Longtime Philly Inquirer<\/em> writer Stephanie Farr wrote a fun piece on Philadelphia sports fandom<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over 250 writers signed a letter to Penguin Random House protesting the publisher\u2019s $2 million book deal<\/a> with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her pivotal role in removing a fundamental right from tens of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Board game news: Aegean Sea, the newest game from Glory to Rome co-designer Carl Chudyk, is up on Backerkit<\/a> with 12 days to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh My Brain!, a new game from Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, is now up for pre-order at $5 off<\/a> on 25th<\/sup> Century\u2019s website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Queen\u2019s Dilemma, a standalone sequel game to the Spiel-nominated King\u2019s Dilemma, is closing in on $400K raised on Kickstarter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week \u2013 a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club, notably their offense. I\u2019m about \u00be of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends. Over at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1083,984,190,961,1268,1105,1196,234,907,870,477,940],"class_list":["post-9600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-board-game-news","tag-guns","tag-links","tag-longreads","tag-misinformation","tag-missouri","tag-parenting","tag-philadelphia","tag-social-media","tag-stick-to-baseball","tag-texas","tag-the-swamp","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9606,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9600\/revisions\/9606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}