Stick to baseball, 1/9/21.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the trade that sent Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets for four players. Just about everything else is on hold as I have started work on the top 100 prospects package, which will run on or around February 1^st.

I will, however, keep writing my free email newsletter this month, with the next issue probably going out by Monday. My thanks to all of you who bought – or asked for – either of my books this holiday season. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books.

And now, the links…

• Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) lost his son to suicide on New Year’s Eve, and then survived the terror attack on the Capitol this week. The Atlantic spoke to him about this awful sequence of events. The Congressman and his wife wrote a beautiful, heartfelt eulogy to their son after his death.
• This was a coup, and it should lead to impeachment.
• The Kansas City Star called for Sen. Josh Hawley to resign or be removed, as members of his own party condemn his words and actions.
•  “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” The Nation‘s Andrew McCormick reports from the scene of the assault.
• The woman who was shot and killed while breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby was an Air Force veteran who fell for the QAnon hoax and other right-wing bullshit spread online.
• How can we fight the flood of false information that led hundreds of Americans to storm the Capitol and scream nonsense about auditing the vote? The Guardian spoke to multiple experts, but there are no simple answers: Disinformation spreads easily, but combating it is harder.
• George Saunders believes social media is killing us. He’s also thinking about writing an epic novel along the lines of the Russian classics.
• A lawsuit over a high school punishing a student for her use of foul language on Snapchat could alter free speech rights for students across the country.
• Federal disaster aid disproportionately helps affluent communities and exacerbates racial and economic disparities.
• The EPA just adopted a new rule making it harder for regulators to use data that aren’t available to the public, yet another way in which the outgoing Administration is making it easier for companies and individuals to despoil the environment with impunity.
• There’s a Danish children’s show about a man who can’t control his enormous penis.
• Just two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has begun attacks against Tigrayan dissidents in the north of the country and now has fallen out with their neighbors in Sudan.
• The BBC has an ode to the alfajor, the most popular cookie in South America.
• A clinical social worker tells of the hospice patient who told him of a ghost he saw who changed his view of life.
• Board game news: there’s a new Kickstarter for the very intriguing game Darwin’s Journey, co-designed by Simone Luciani, the designer of Tzolk’in and Tekhenu.