Stick to baseball, 7/2/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a minor league scouting blog post on the Giants’ Kyle Harrison and several other Giants, Red Sox, and Pirates prospects. I’ll have another one on Monday on some Phillies, White Sox, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest this week on The Keith Law Show was Jason Kander, author of the new book Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been holding off on sending out my free email newsletter because the bad news hasn’t stopped and I’m not really sure what to say at this point, but I’ll do it soon. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: “It is unconscionable that politicians would label it as child abuse,” says Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper about gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary minors. The cover story in the latest issue of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology looks at the importance of such care and the role that psychologists should play in it.
• In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz asks if Hungary under its tyrannical leader Viktor Orbán gives us an idea of what our authoritarian future might look like.
• Also in the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes that we are not going back to pre-Roe, but to some place much worse.
• After the SCOTUS ruling dismantling women’s reproductive rights came down, right-wing influencers spread rumors of impending violence from those angered by the ruling, including the supposed activist group Jane’s Revenge. The violence never occurred, and I still can’t find hard evidence Jane’s Revenge is an actual group.
• Dana Milbank of the Washington Post writes of the Supreme Court’s “radicals” sowing maximum chaos with their inconsistent use of precedent and selective applications of history.
• Adam Serwer of the Atlantic writes that the Constitution is whatever the right-wing says it is, regardless of the document’s text or judicial precedent, calling it “undead constitutionalism.”
• Vox’s Ian Millhiser says Neil Gorsuch lied about the facts of the Kennedy v. Bremerton case to gift a victory to the religious right.
• The New York Times’s Paul Krugman tweeted his disdain for the recent run of SCOTUS decisions.
• CNN’s Jill Filipovic wrote that “the Republican Party has a rape problem” about the spate of abortion bans that don’t even try to make an exception for victims of rape or incest.
• The arrest of Lizelle Herrera in Texas for having a miscarriage is far from unique and likely to become more common in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling.
• Mexican abortion clinics are preparing for an influx of patients from the United States, especially with two border states trying to completely ban the medical procedure.
• A ten-year-old girl in Ohio who was six weeks and three days pregnant had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio banned the procedure for anyone, for any reason, after six weeks. I just want to restate that the pregnant person here was a ten-year-old girl.
• A major Kansas City area health system has stopped providing Plan B contraception in its Missouri facilities after the state banned all abortions, even for victims of sexual assault.
• Marcus Stroman was one of many MLB players to criticize the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
• President Biden appears to have struck a deal with Sen. Mitch McConnell to put an anti-abortion judge on the federal bench in Kentucky
• On the Athletic, Hockey Canada is losing sponsors after it came out that they covered up an incident where eight of their players sexually assaulted a woman, who sued the organization and signed an NDA when they settled.
• Mental Floss writes of the 600-year history of the singular ‘they.’
• Angeli Rose Gomez, the Uvalde mother who rushed into the elementary school to save her two boys during the massacre there, has been harassed by police and had to move out from her sons to protect them. She’s suing the department now.
• Police in New Haven, Connecticut, put a Black man in handcuffs, threw him in a van without a seatbelt, and then made an abrupt stop while driving, which threw him within the van and made him a quadriplegic. He’s on a respirator, eating through a feeding tube, and is suing the department.
• Two Virginia politicians, both Republicans, filed a lawsuit seeking to have a graphic memoir called Gender Queer declared obscene. The ACLU, PEN America, the Virginia Library Association, the Authors Guild, Barnes & Noble, and several other groups all signed a letter opposing the suit.
• Alan Henry, author of the new book Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, spoke to Objective Journalism about his career as a Black man in traditional journalism, including some negative experiences at the New York Times.
• California is considering a bill that would give their state medical board more power to discipline doctors who spread medical misinformation, and of course anti-vaxxers are unhappy about it.
• I regret to inform you that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is once again feuding with a Muppet.
• This video of highlights from the Wyoming Republican House primary debate is … something.
• The price of Turkey agreeing to admit Sweden and Finland into NATO is Turkey’s demand now that those two nations extradite 33 opponents of the Turkish regime, including members of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party and followers of an exiled cleric whom Turkey blames for a failed 2016 coup attempt.
• The group Check My Ads is targeting Fox News’ advertisers as the network’s hosts have been downplaying the January 6^th insurrection.
• It’s rare, but we have our first confirmed case of a human getting SARS-CoV-2 from a cat.
• Board game news: NPR’s Throughline podcast does a deep dive on the history of Monopoly, from its disputed origins to its flawed depiction of the American dream. (Not discussed is why the game is actually terrible.)
• Stonewall Uprising, a two-player game about the watershed moment in gay rights in the United States, is on Kickstarter and already almost 400% funded.
• Stonemaier Games teased the next expansion, Asia, for Wingspan, although it won’t be available for several more months.