Stick to baseball, 5/27/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft of 2023, and answered a slew of questions from readers.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Motor City, from the brains behind Fleet: the Dice Game and Three Sisters.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Scott McCaughey, founding member of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus Five, and the Baseball Project, the last of which are about to release a new album, Grand Salami Time! and tour in support of it.You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I owe everyone a fresh newsletter, which I’ve already started writing so I suppose I can at least share the link to sign up.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: New York profiles Nebraska legislator Michaela Cavanaugh, part of the filibuster against that state’s transphobic bill, who said on the floor “I want the bloody hands recorded” because the bill, now a law, will lead to the deaths of trans kids.

• The New Yorker examines whether Planned Parenthood is doing enough to fight for abortion rights and the dwindling number of providers who offer this essential health care.

• ProPublica looks at a man who believed his local school board was pushing “transgender bullshit,” got arrested for trespassing at a meeting, and was only further encouraged when the charges were dropped and he faced no consequences. Much of the rhetoric attributed to him in this article sounds like the same nonsense that so-called “sovereign citizens” have used to avoid paying taxes.

• ProPublica also exposed the use of “family reunification camps,” which often force children to attend with parents who may have been neglectful or even abusive. After the article ran, Colorado became the first state to limit courts’ ability to use them.

• Will Leitch wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how Trump running for President again means that families will be back to fighting again.

• Who’s footing the bills for Ron DeSantis’s Presidential campaign? The Michigan nonprofit funding him won’t say where the money is coming from.

• And who’s footing the bills for Kyrsten Sinema? Turns out the dark-money group behind her is funded a long of extreme right-wingers, like Harlan Crow, James Rupert Murdoch, and Nelson Peltz.

• An Illinois state investigation found the Catholic Church lied about how many children its clergy abused, putting the actual number at nearly two thousand since 1950. These are actual groomers, people who have harmed kids and a tax-exempt organization that allowed it to continue.

• If you live in Florida and want to restore reproductive rights, here’s a petition you can print out and sign to try to get abortion on the ballot there.

• Meanwhile, Florida is going to arrest people in bathrooms regardless of their legal gender status. How anyone can miss the parallels to Germany under the Nazis is beyond me.

• Ohio’s Senate passed a bill that will gut diversity initiatives in higher education in the state while curtailing academic freedom

• The Washington Post examined book-banning requests across the country and found that the majority came from just eleven cranks people.

• Lauren Boebert, she of good Christian family values and whatnot, is getting a divorce. It says a lot about why Republican men are pushing as hard as ever on their misogynistic policy goals.

• Exavier Pope wrote about how Ja Morant was wrong, but the reaction to him says more about America’s fear of Black gun owners.

• With a little sodium citrate, you can make any cheese into a silky-smooth cheese sauce, even cheeses that don’t ordinarily melt.

• I actually backed Filler, a new storage system for small-box board games, on Kickstarter. When I first got the pitch, I thought it was silly, but then I realized how many of these games I own and how sloppy they tend to look on the shelves.