For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted a ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft, and had a draft blog post earlier in the week that looked at Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, Kyle Teel, Jake Gelof, and Alex Mooney. I also did a Q&A at the Athletic to talk about the draft.
My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Will Leitch, whose new novel, The Time Has Come, comes out on May 16th (pre-order here), talking about this book and his last one, plus a little about the Cardinals and just our general banter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Earth, one of the hottest new games of this year, one that reminds me a lot of Wingspan but with more of the engine-building.
I’m on Spoutible and Bluesky now, both as keithlaw.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: New York looks at Richard Walter, a self-appointed criminal profiler who testified in multiple murder cases despite a lack of credentials and increasingly tall tales about his resume. National media coverage of Walter and his so-called “Vidocq Society” helped elevate his profile (no pun intended) and allowed him to continue pulling his con for two decades – even to this day.
- We need a new antifungal drug to combat the spread of resistant Aspergillus fumigatus, and one’s on the way – but a fungicide that attacks the same molecular pathway may hit the market first and render the antifungal drug ineffective.
- ProPublica explains how South Carolina Republicans booted the only woman on state’s Supreme Court and replaced her with a compliant male candidate instead.
- Two articles on the murder of Jordan Neely: Intelligencer looks at New York City’s failure to grapple with the homeless epidemic, and Hellgate NY looks at the bystander effect and the people who watched Neely die and did nothing.
- The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey had an exceptionally transparent and reflective response to its failure to respond to bullying of a student there who later committed suicide.
- Herschel Walker’s Senate run never seemed like a serious endeavor, but a Daily Beast investigation found that he may have redirected over a half a million dollars in donations intended for his campaign to his personal accounts.
- Dr. Peter Hotez, co-developer of the Corbevax vaccine against COVID-19, wrote in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s BioAdvances journal about the threat of anti-science conspiracies among Americans to scientists and their work.
- The anti-trans American College of Pediatricians left a huge batch of confidential files on an unsecured Google Drive account, including member info, tax records, and more. You can find their member list here if you want to check to see if your pediatrician (or one you know) belongs.
- Scientific American offers a simple, lay explanation of what puberty blockers are and how they work, something I think most anti-trans arguers don’t understand.
- Former GLAAD Chair Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman and activist, wrote for the Washington Post about how biological sex is determined in the brain, and it’s not just a matter of sex organs.
- Three Texas churches donated to a political candidate in Abilene County, a clear tax code violation that should cost them their tax-exempt status.
- The Health and Human Services Department has warned hospitals that deny women abortions when they experience medical emergencies that they are violating federal law.
- The teen section at a library in an Indianapolis suburb was half empty after a “review” by the library board that cost $300,000.
- More than half of the early adopters of Twitter Blue have already unsubscribed. It’s almost like the guy running the place lacks a business plan!
- Putative Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy paid someone to remove unflattering content from his Wikipedia entry, which makes him a moron, because who the hell pays to edit Wikipedia?
- Two anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists are on trial in the UK for plotting to destroy 5G cell towers.
- E.J. Dionne wrote that we should follow Pres. Biden’s exhortation that we argue about freedom.
- Marc Elias writes about how organization can’t defeat Republican voter suppression efforts.
- I can’t even keep up with the tide of Clarence Thomas corruption stories, but here’s one I caught that doesn’t seem to have received enough attention – Harlan Crow said that tenant protections hurt his profits, and Thomas voted twice to end them.
- Dire Wolf’s Kickstarter for Clank! Legacy Season 2 is already over $450,000. I have only played four of the ten chapters of the first one with my friend Mike, but we both really liked it.
There’s a good think piece to write about an SC that helped pass Citizens United while seeming to hold themselves to a much lower standard than almost every other federal employee and government contractor. Thomas has himself a billionaire sugar daddy who is taking him on exotic vacations, pays his adopted son’s boarding school tuition, etc. He discloses none of that despite a report that is now emerging that someone complained about that relationship in 2012. Then you have the fact that Leonard Leo (the head of the Federalist Society) is caught helping Ginni creating a bunch of shell companies that will get her paid a fortune while not making it obvious that she’s getting paid a ton by groups filing amicus briefs in the court on various cases and usually winning. Roberts’s wife is a recruiter (making 10 million and counting so far) for top legal firms knowing many of these firms argue in front of the SC. There’s Gorsuch’s little sale. Sotomayor forgets to recuse herself in a case involving the publisher of her book. Any of those ethical lapses could be an issue but this has become a pattern. For Roberts to tell the Senate to pound sand in the face of all of this is an insult to every federal employee who frets about whether they’re going to accidentally violate ethics and conflict of interest policies. It seems very problematic to put it mildly that the SC doesn’t seem interested in ethics reform which is even worse because these are lifetime appointments. Thomas is free to do things that would get almost any other federal employee fired.
When did you become a raving Communist?
Please define “Communist” without using Google or any other resource. I’ll wait.
Is that you Tailgunner Joe McCarthy?
Bo, you clearly don’t know diddly.
I applaud Walker for just taking money. Similar to George Santos. Congress is set up for rampant corruption and the persons being fleeced are just wealthy ghouls.
Santos is the best example of a congressperson we have. It’s nakedly corrupt and he’s hilarious. The sanctimonious BS is nauseating. Dick Durbin, leader of Senate Judiciary committee, keeps saying that someone should do something about the SC corruption. It’s comical. Santos is just the perfect distilled person. He stuck his finger in the air and grifted his way to a Congress spot.
At least you can in theory vote out a member of Congress. The SC means a lifetime appointment and lord knows you can’t get two-thirds of the Senate to agree on anything so you can’t remove them. The founders thought lifetime appointments for the SC meant that they’d be less susceptible to corruption but the opposite seems to be true. Plus the founders didn’t really have a plan in mind for the SC until the SC created one in Marbury v Madison. Also one could point out that it now makes sense why this SC voted for Citizens United. They view corruption and grifting as a feature not a bug of what happens at the higher levels of government plus they were almost all guilty of something.
For the life of me, I can’t really understand why anyone would think a lifetime appointment would make someone LESS susceptible to corruption. Did our genius, infallible “founding fathers” really think that there would be a full system of checks and balances on the courts, too?
The rationale was that if you were there for life you wouldn’t have to all the time campaign for your job and you wouldn’t be answering to voters who you would want to please, and therefore could make judgements in an unpolitical way.
A very pie in the sky line of thinking to be sure, but in a vacuum there is some merit.
But like everything else, the wide spectrum of views in this country, and the increasingly lunatic right wing party have exposed all the faults with how our system was set-up (I’m sure some would rightly argue those faults were exposed a long time ago….)
I bet Keith isn’t really waiting for Bo the troll to define communism.
Unless he gets push alerts on his phone when someone with the IP address/email that matches Bo’s makes a comment, probably not. But I do enjoy seeing some of the right start adding adjectives prior to “liberal/leftist/communist” to differentiate people on the left. Like how different is a just a regular leftist from a “super leftist” or a liberal from an “really, super, raving, uber liberal”? Is there a chart that explains it or is it up to the individual?
A bit late to this, but the Scientific America article got severely critiqued in about two minutes.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jessesingal/p/a-critique-of-scientific-americans?r=1ju3r&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
It would be nice if their articled were a bit more scientific.
A blog post from a non-scientist writer with a history of misrepresenting the science on trans kids really isn’t worth anything here. I’m not surprised you read his nonsense, but i’m disappointed you’re citing it.
Here’s a more thorough critique of Singal, including his writing in defense of a disgraced Toronto doctor whose clinic was closed for its use of deprecated techniques that turned out to increase the risk of suicide in trans kids. He’s not a reliable source on trans issues.
You know the author of the Scientific American article isn’t a scientist, and you don’t really address his criticisms of the article. But that’s how this always goes with Singal’s writing. There’s no addressing what’s actually written. The science with regards to gender affirming care for children is very unsettled as is the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatment. Pretending otherwise doesn’t accomplish anything.