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)