My first attempt to project this year’s first-round picks went up on Wednesday; I’ll do this again three times before the draft, with the next one coming after Memorial Day. Earlier in the week, I did my annual ten-year lookback pieces, one on redrafting the 2006 first round and the other on the first-rounders from that year who didn’t work out.
I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday, and have a new game review up at Paste on the light family-friendly card game Zany Penguins.
Thanks to all of you who’ve signed up for my newsletter. I send a note more or less whenever I post new content somewhere, and usually add a little story or extra content too.
And now, the links…
- A longtime reader of mine, Travis, has an unfortunate story that he shared with me: His newborn daughter is already in hospice care after a bout of meningitis that hit after she was born at 27 weeks. The full story is on their GoFundMe page; I donated and encourage you to do the same.
- Amazing longread from the Atlantic on the false certainty we get from DNA results in criminal cases.
- Great blog post on the challenges of fighting vaccine-denial propaganda. I guess the good news is that the film Vaxxed has gained no traction outside of its core, cult-like audience.
- This piece on dating from a woman who does not want children has one really infuriating passage, about men who tried to impregnate her against her wishes. In the UK, that’s considered rape, but in the U.S. I don’t believe it is.
- As yet another sports … uh, figure? … used the term “pansy” this week to describe baseball without broken limbs and bloody faces, I thought I’d link to The Pansy Project, in which a gay artist plants a single pansy at the sites of homophobic comments or attacks, joining with the recipient in a sort of show of strength. “Pansy,” by the way, has referred to either a gay man or an overly effeminate one for over a hundred years.
- The Washington Post‘s oral history of the making of Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” is a must read for anyone who remembers the impact that song had on the musical culture of the day. It’s surprising and disturbing for me to hear cries of racism at MTV; I grew up in about as white a town as you’ll find on the eastern seaboard, and when MTV aired anything by black artists that wasn’t adult contemporary crap, I devoured it. Rap, Prince and his various protegées, Living Colour, it didn’t matter. If it was novel, I was interested.
- Also from WaPo, from March, the story of a violin prodigy who stole a Stradivarius.
- An ethics professor at Yale and major figure in the social justice movement in academia stands credibly accused of sexual harassment. And Yale hasn’t done much to stop him.
- The New Yorker takes a serious look at the buffoon James O’Keefe, and what his brand of negative campaigning means for both sides in the 2016 Presidential election. (Hint: Nothing good for democracy.)
- Yes, it’s about a colleague, but I still enjoyed Josh Levin’s piece on why Zach Lowe is the best sportswriter in America.
- A rare bit of positive news in the fight against antibiotic resistance, thanks to a five-year experiment in building such molecules from scratch rather than modifying existing ones.