Stick to baseball, 7/17/21.

All of my draft coverage is now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including my team-by-team draft recaps, posted by division:
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I also recapped the Futures Game with notes on prospects who stood out or who I saw for the first time. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: A new preprint on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 states that “there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2” and “there is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.” This failed hypothesis isn’t just the province of the right-wing; the anti-GMO movement has also latched on to it.
• A conservative activist invented the nontroversy over critical race theory. If someone tells you CRT is bad, just ask them to name an author who’s written about it, or a book on the subject. Like this Alabama columnist did to a state lawmaker.
• This ran a few weeks ago, during my hiatus from these posts, but former sportswriter Kat O’Brien detailed how she was raped by a major league ballplayer while she was on the Rangers beat.
• Influencers who peddle anti-vaccine misinformation are raking in cash from their efforts. It’s almost entirely a grift, with a societal cost measured in bodies.
• The Delta variant’s threat explained in three simple points by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong.
• The “mystery Chinese seeds” that made the rounds of the news last summer? Probably just a brushing scam.
• Why don’t we have a vaccine against Lyme disease? It’s complicated. Anti-vaxxers, a dubious claim about side effects, and the regional nature of the disease all contributed.
• A nurse in Louisiana who posted anti-vaccine views and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has, in fact, died of COVID-19.
• Poynter spoke to Walter Hussman, the conservative megadonor to UNC who led the school to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure and ultimately cost them her services. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, but also disputes some of the story that’s been publicly reported.
• MEL magazine is coming back.
• A power plant in upstate New York is primarily powering a bitcoin mining operation, warming Seneca Lake and polluting the air (as well as contributing to climate change). I’m not sure what the solution is – taxing bitcoin is the most rational economic move, but tricky because of its nature – but cryptocurrencies are an environmental threat that demands some sort of government action.
• Why did three people in different states contract the often-fatal tropical bacterial disease melioidosis?
• The state of Alabama took a man’s gun after he shot his wife. Nine months later, they gave it back to him, despite a protection order, and he used it to kill her. I’m sure the fact that he was a cop had nothing to do with this.
• Men read far fewer books by women than women do. This has real-world implications for the way readers’ minds work.