My one Insider post from this week is my ranking of the top 50 draft prospects for this June’s MLB draft, a strong year without a lot of clarity up top after #1 overall prospect Casey Mize.
Here on the dish, I ranked all 90 Pulitzer Prize winners in the Fiction/Novel category in advance of Monday’s announcement of this year’s winners. I’ve now read the newest entry, Less, and will update the ranking next week.
I have a new event to announce: on July 14th, the day before this year’s MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at Politics & Prose, a Washington, DC, independent bookstore that is legendary for its author appearances. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball, which is now out in paperback.
And now, the links…
- SI‘s Greg Bishop tracked down former NFL QB Jake Locker, who opens up about why he retired in 2015. Locker was a first-round talent in baseball, too, but he says in this piece he never had the same passion for it that he had for football.
- Liberty University, run by extreme right-wing conservative Jerry Falwell, Jr., has built a $1 billion empire by aggressively recruiting students for its online degree programs, according to this expose from ProPublica and the NY Times.
- ProPublica also released a long investigative piece on how waste from burning coal has contaminated drinking water in nearby communities. The current Administration is pushing increased reliance on coal and rolling back environmental regulations on its use.
- Lindsay Gibbs looks at the continuing institutional failures at Michigan State in the wake of the school’s two-decade refusal to consider complaints about Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of patients on campus. MSU continues to deny any wrongdoing in the mishandling (or non-handling) of investigations into Nassar, even as one of his victims revealed that now interim MSU President John Engler tried to bribe her into staying silent.
- New York ran a very long Q&A with many architects of the modern Internet, who then “apologize” for the way the stuff they built has been used to ruin everything.
- Gizmodo’s John Cook argues that journalists should not be cheering the Sean Hannity-Michael Cohen revelation, as it’s deleterious to the operation of the free press. Hannity, meanwhile, has been busy promoting a company in which he holds an ownership stake, disguised by the use of a shell company, and may have violated federal securities laws.
- Twitter accounts of questionable origin are pushing fake conspiracy theories around Syria, such as claiming the Assad regime didn’t use chemical weapons on its own people and calling it a ‘false flag’ operation.
- Several Sandy Hook parents are suing Alex Jones & InfoWars for defamation in response to his repeated claims that the massacre was staged.
- Surprising nobody, FiveThirtyEight reported that umpire calls in extra innings are biased towards ending the games. I wouldn’t really mind this if, say, the strike zone changed equally for both teams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
- The Marlins, having already scammed Florida taxpayers for a new stadium, are now trying to dodge a lawsuit from the state over profits from the recent sale of the team, are claiming they’re actually based in the British Virgin Islands … but Marlins Man found their ‘office’ there is just a PO box.
- Prince’s estate released an early recording of his song “Nothing Compares 2 U,”, which, of course, later became a global hit for Sinead O’Connor.
- Commencement Day speakers at my alma mater have tended toward the famous and dreary, but this year’s class will get a treat: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of several novels, including the superb Half of a Yellow Sun.
- Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be about to elect a white supremacist to its school board. Be better, North Dakota.
- Chef and charcutier Matt Hinckley writes for Food & Wine about getting sober after years of drinking, which he had justified as part of his job working in busy restaurant kitchens and brewing/distilling at home.
- A junk study in a predatory journal pushes, again, the bullshit claim that vaccines cause autism, as Skeptical Raptor breaks down on his site.
- The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional an Indiana law restricting abortion rights. The law would have prohibited abortions based on potential disabilities in the fetus – so, if genetic testing found that the fetus had Tay-Sachs disorder, the woman would not have been able to abort the pregnancy even though infantile Tay-Sachs kills most victims before age 4.
- Wisconsin’s Attorney General told a radio host last week that Trump carried the state because of its voter ID law, which primarily disenfranchised voters in heavily Democratic areas.
- Eagle-Gryphon announced a Kickstarter for Fleet! The Dice Game, a spinoff of their popular 2012 game Fleet! (which I have not played)
Interesting article on the Syrian situation. I’ll stop short of joining in with the theorists and say I’d prefer a policy where missiles aren’t fired until after an at least nominally independent body confirms the suspicions. And it has revealed the narrow band of acceptable reactions among mainstream media outlets, where the debate has centered around the appropriate degree of military intervention, as though the question of “to bomb or not to bomb” has been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.
Yes, bombing seems to be the publicly acceptable response these days – no troops on the ground, we’re good, fire away. Our longstanding drone-strike work in Yemen has killed a lot of civilians and made a lot of new would-be terrorists with uncertain gain and virtually no criticism from American media.
I agree that it is troubling that the media doesn’t even ask the “should we bomb” question. But I am also troubled by acceptance of the BBC’s premise that questioning the official Syria narrative amounts to “pushing fake conspiracy theories.” There is limited reliable evidence that the Assad regime used chemical weapons in Douma and some compelling firsthand evidence to the contrary (e.g. Robert Fisk’s report from Douma). And of course, the bombs were launched before any independent investigation could be conducted.
Separately, while this may have been unintentional, I find the juxtaposition with the following bullet point regarding Alex Jones and Infowars’ actual conspiracy theories jarring. Characterizing antiwar activists’ questioning a largely unsupported official narrative in a context of limited and imperfect information as a “conspiracy theory”, intentionally or not, creates a false equivalence with unhinged Sandy Hook deniers who harass victims’ parents and demand that they exhume their dead children’s remains to disprove their baseless speculation.
The BBC piece is not saying that the official account is true. It points out that agents of dubious backgrounds are pushing these conspiracy theories without evidence or even any credibility. That is not equivalent to calling all questioning of the official accounts conspiracy theories.
It’s a small thing, but it’s the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. District courts at the federal level are trial courts.
Thanks – fixed that. I confess to ignorance on that topic.
This is certainly not the place to come if you need a quick pick-me-up on a Saturday afternoon.
Great news that you’ll be at Politics & Prose. I’m 3 blocks down Connecticut Ave so will make sure to swing through. After the event will you be walking a half block down to continue the investigation into Comet Ping Pong?
I could certainly investigate some pizza.
Voter ID laws are subject to the worst abuses. Here are the acceptable photo ID’s allowed from the Wisconsin website.. In the article attached, I used the first embedded link, which lead me to a Rolling Stone article. I laughed at that idea.
https://www.bringitwisconsin.com/do-i-have-right-photo-id
Basically you need a state or federally issued photo ID. Or a non photo ID issued because of a religious exemption. They will also be provided at no cost. In 2015- SCOTUS declined to hear a challenge to the law.
So to vote, you need to prove your identity with a government issued photo ID. How is that unreasonable?
The law even has some more brutal aspects. The name on voting roll, doesn’t have to be an exact match to the name on the photo ID. Nor does the address have to be an exact match to the address on the voting roll.
First of all, it is unreasonable because we now have evidence that, in practice, these laws result in substantially fewer eligible voters voting, while providing little to no benefit in fraud reduction (because the fraud never existed).
Second, you seriously underestimate the actual cost of getting those ID cards. You even made the “no cost” mistake.
So, how are states or the country better off for any law that reduces voter turnout and imposes needless costs on its poorest voters?
It’s almost as if Kris Kobach ran a commission that sought a solution for a problem that didn’t exist….And here I was thinking that Mike Pence was actually doing something. We need to refocus our energies on the basement of Comet Ping Pong, as that doesn’t exist either.