Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
• This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
• The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
• A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
• The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’ve left the US for Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
• Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
• The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
• Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
• Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
• Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
• Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
• Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
• A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
• Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
• A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
• Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
• Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
• The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
• Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
• We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
• Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
• Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).