For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:
- My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
- My AL team draft recaps
- My NL team draft recaps
- My post-draft Q&A
- My final mock draft, if you’re curious
I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.
I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:
- Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
- ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
- Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
- Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
- Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
- Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
- Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
- Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
- This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
- Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
- Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
- And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
- Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
- Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
- Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
- Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
- Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
- The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
- A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
- A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
- As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
- Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
- Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
- Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
- India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
- The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
- GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
- Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
- Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
- Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.