Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

• Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

• The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

• Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

• Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

• Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

• Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

• Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

• Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

• This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

• I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

• A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

• The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

• An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

• Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

• The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

• Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

• One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
• Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.