Stick to baseball, 5/20/23.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – a minor league scouting notebook on prospects with the Brewers, Pirates, and Phillies; and a draft scouting notebook looking at Max Clark, Dillon Head, Mac Horvath, and more.

My guests on the Keith Law Show the last two weeks have been Max Bazerman, discussing his new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop; and Russell Carleton, talking about his upcoming second book The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a reminder you can also find me on Spoutible and Bluesky as @keithlaw.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This (extremely long) piece from the New York Times Magazine on a woman whose dementia led to a long battle between her daughters and her second husband, whom the daughters accused of abusing and manipulating her, is sad and sobering for all of us with parents getting into that age range.

• Three pieces from ProPublica: How South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn (D) conspired with Republicans to gerrymander his way into a safer seat, and how a former NFL player has sold “child ID kits” to eleven states despite no evidence they work and free alternatives already available, and how NYPD investigators never even asked for footage showing that one officer tried to stop his partner from killing an unarmed Black man. The investigators cleared both officers of any wrongdoing.

• A new research paper found, once again, that sports stadiums/facilities do not generate enough ancillary economic activity to justify their costs to taxpayers when subsidized by the government. This Boston Business Journal piece covers the paper’s examination of Polar Park in Worcester.

• NBC News has a longread on how conservatives took over the school board in Woodland Park, Colorado, ushering in a right-wing curriculum, forcing out employees who spoke out, and engaging in apparent self-dealing.

• The Guardian spoke to a number of Florida teachers about their experiences under the state’s draconian new laws restricting their speech and lesson content, with several saying they’re considering leaving the state and/or the profession. Florida already has a severe teacher shortage, by the way.

• The science behind reverse osmosis filtering was unclear, until a paper published in April upended the previous model and opened up the possibility of new membranes that make filtration, including desalination, more energy-efficient.

• A conservative “foundation” recruited fifteen men at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to pretend they were veterans kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants coming up from New York City. The plan fooled state Assemblyman Brian Maher (R), who fed the outrage machine until he had to admit he’d been had.

• The Philly Inquirer has a story on a victim of the romance scam known as ‘pig butchering’ who ended up out $450,000 to a con artist she met on Hinge.

• An invasive weed known as stinknet has taken over Arizona’s Sonoran desert, fueling wildfires, crowding out native species, and causing lung problems for nearby residents. And it’s spreading.

• The executive director of the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana wrote in the Washington Post about the Republican-controlled state government’s attack on the institute, which prohibits the university from using any state funds to support the institute. It’s culture-war bullshit that impedes important research.

• Bryan Slaton has resigned his post in the Texas legislature after it emerged that he’d behaved inappropriately with an intern. The Republican once introduced legislation to ban children from attending drag shows, claiming it was some form of grooming.

• Meanwhile, doctors at Austin’s Dell Clinic who were treating trans kids there are leaving after the state’s under-indictment AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the facility after the duplicitous far-right Project Veritas claimed it was conducting surgery on kids as young as eight. The Texas Observer found documents from the also right-wing American College of Pediatricians setting out a playbook for how to defund trans care in Texas.

• The current moral panic over trans kids is part of a larger effort to control the lives of American youths, argues researcher Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff in Scientific American.

• Richard Uilhein, the right-wing billionaire owner of U-Line, is one of the chief backers of the proposed Ohio amendment that will make it harder for future amendments to pass by raising the threshold from 50% to 60%. Don’t buy from U-Line!

• Ohio Republicans are trying to follow Florida’s lead in banning DEI programs at state universities and mandating their sort of indoctrination in the classroom, along with the definitely not problematic proposal to base tenure on whether a professor taught with “bias.”

• I know you’re shocked, but Iowa’s new law allowing residents to use school vouchers for private and even religious schools has led many of those schools to raise tuition in response. You’d think they might have learned from the national student loan fiasco.

• Nebraska legislator Megan Hunt is the hero we need. Just don’t call her a Democrat.

• I agree with everything in this Mary Sue post about the disappointing S3 of Ted Lasso, which has none of the things that made the show good in its first two seasons. But at least the episodes are longer!

• A woman in Utah who wrote a children’s book about how to deal with grief after her husband died has now been charged with his murder.

• Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has no problem with white nationalists serving in the U.S. military.

• The Arab League has quietly reinstated Syria, more than a decade after the nation and its murderous dictator President Bashad al-Assad were expelled for violent reprisals against protestors leading up to the country’s 12-year civil war.

• Two mass shootings in Serbia have led to public demonstrations and a wave of people turning in their guns. Must be nice.

• Jasper Fforde ffans like me have waited thirteen years for a sequel to his novel Shades of Grey. It’s finally coming, as Red Side Story will be released in the UK in February of 2024. No word yet on a U.S. release; the fourth Dragonslayer novel didn’t get one, which is not a great sign.

• Ben Collins wrote at NBC News about how Twitter has disabled some key content-moderation controls, allowing things like animal torture videos to spread across the site. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been busy spreading misinformation about the Texas mall shooter.

• The best piece I read on CNN’s Trump Town Hall faceplant was, in fact, this one on Teen Vogue.

• This post from WBUR’s Here and Now recommending some modern board games for families is actually very good.