My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.
After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This Atlantic column by Simon Sebag Montefiore on the decolonization narrative around Gaza and Israel has been shared, critiqued, attacked, and so on more than anything else I’ve seen on the conflict. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t agree with every point the author makes, but it is thoughtful and does make some very good points. The twenty minutes it took me to read it was time well spent, and I can’t say that about many things I read in general, certainly not on a topic as fraught as this one. Adam Serwer, also in the Atlantic, wrote a shorter piece arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By the way, the staid Financial Times’ editorial board called for a humanitarian cease-fire this week.
- This harassment case at UC Berkeley is absolutely bonkers, yet there are students protesting in favor of the professor who harassed a colleague so extensively that she’s been banned from campus – apparently because she’s a person of color and her victim is not?
- The Verge’s Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive on “the people who ruined the internet,” search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, asking if they ruined search or if search is even ruined at all.
- When LibsofTikTok, the anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account run by former realtor Chaya Raichik, tweets about a hospital, a school, a library, or a private individual, threats of violence follow. USA Today built off research from the liberal group Media Matters to find over two dozen incidents where bomb or death threats followed a LibsofTikTok tweet. She’s particularly targeting public schools, with USA Today identifying at least twelve incidents where a school received threats after she tweeted about it.
- The New York Times has the story of a French case where a 15-year-old girl falsely accused a 17-year-old boy, the son of Moroccan immigrants, of raping her, only to recant 23 years later. This very humanist retelling looks at the toll the false accusation took on Farid El Haïry’s life even though he only spent a year or so in prison, and how difficult it still is for him to move on.
- JAMA has yet another study showing that masks work in limiting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. I do still wear one when traveling, at least, since it’s the one time I’m in proximity to a lot of strangers. Very few others do, even on airplanes.
- There’s a rising trend of hidden MLMs on TikTok, pushed by self-styled ‘experts’ selling detoxification products for kids. Just a reminder that for almost every human, the liver handles detox responsibilities. You don’t need anything else.
- Increased belief in false health information is driving vaccine acceptance down. Looking forward to the return of preventable childhood diseases!
- STIs are on the rise as states found out they’re not getting the last two years’ worth of a $1 billion federal program to fight these infections as the program was cut during the debt ceiling deal.
- A new preprint (meaning it’s not peer-reviewed yet) available on the SocArXiv server argues that merely platforming extreme right-wing actors normalizes their viewpoints even in the face of critical interviewing or coverage. In other words, sunshine may not always be the best disinfectant.
- Related: Stew Peters, who hosts a program on Rumble and has a sizable following on Twitter, called for shooting Catholic Charities workers who help would-be immigrants to the United States. Peters has had some prominent figures as guests on his show, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Arizona Republicans Kari Lake, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar.
- NYC Mayor Eric Adams is now under investigation for possible illegal campaign donations from the Turkish government.
- Mayor Adams and new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have something in common – both believe, and say, that they were put in their positions by God. God is, as the article says, unavailable for comment.
- Several House Republicans introduced a bill to expel Palestinians from the United States, because it’s 1933.
- WIRED covers some myths and truths about smartphone batteries.
- Littleton, New Hampshire, is considering banning public art because some folks didn’t like a diversity mural that was partly organized by a local Pride group. One of the town’s three council members makes no bones about bringing her religion into her government job, saying that the Bible says that “homosexuality is an abomination.”
- Speaking of bans, Republicans are trying to Newspeak their way out of their abortion-banning policies – the word “ban” appears at least six times in relation to abortion in the Republican Party platform – by pushing back on the use of the word “ban” at all. They’re testing this out in Virginia, which has legislative elections on Tuesday, and if they succeed there, they’ll roll this out nationwide for next November.
- A lawsuit in Texas, filed there by an anti-abortion activist to try to get the most favorable court possible, could bankrupt Planned Parenthood by making specious claims that the nonprofit needs to return reimbursements to Medicaid.
- An Alabama mayor and pastor killed himself after he was outed as LGBTQ+. A right-wing news site posted photos of F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in women’s clothing and claimed he referred to himself as a trans woman.
- HBO CEO Corey Bloys used sockpuppet and burner accounts to try to troll and deride critics of the channel’s programming or of him personally.
- There’s a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe caused by a lack of access to clean water.
- The BBC examines the dark side of touch-screen tipping, and some of the psychology involved in why we tip more on these platforms.
- Over at Field of Schemes, Neil deMause exposes how Jackson County, Missouri, might actually give the Royals over $6 billion in funding for a new stadium the team doesn’t need.
- I linked a few weeks ago to the dubious reason that Target was giving for the closure of some Seattle stores, citing rising crime. Popular.info found data showing those stores were affected less by crime than those in surrounding areas. Do not just take corporations’ words as gospel.
- The wonderful, quirky Weckerly’s Ice Cream in Fishtown, Philadelphia, is closing in December.
- Here’s a nice palate cleanser: GQ interviewed Danny DeVito.
You mention critiques/attacks on the Atlantic article, so I want to expand on that briefly. Specifically, I think what Montefiore does with that piece is really the most insidious and pernicious kind of evil. His rhetoric may not call for the elimination of Palestine or explicitly invoke fascist ideology, but instead launders those ideas (or adjacent ideas) through a fundamentally dishonest appeal to reasonableness, which serves to provide moral/intellectual cover to those who would otherwise oppose the obvious atrocities of Israel’s siege on Gaza. All told, it’s perhaps the magnum opus of the “both-sides” approach to punditry that is in actuality the face of polite fascism.
To demonstrate this, I want to highlight a couple of his most egregious lies. The first and most revealing is literally the opening two paragraphs. The first graph establishes a two-state solution as the only possible resolution without any supporting argument. The second graph then says that the most basic cry for Palestinian liberation “endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis.” Ignoring that this is the functional equivalent of saying that “black lives matter” calls for the elimination of white people, what he’s really doing here is saying that the basic liberal values described by “from the river to the sea,” the very idea of a pluralistic state where all are afforded the same freedoms and rights, is not possible nor desirable. It is implicitly a call to uphold the existing state of things where increasingly few people, Palestinian or Israeli, are afforded such freedoms.
Later, he says that “None of [Israel’s actions] constitute genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed.” The only support he gives for the first part of this argument is population growth, which ignores that the Genocide Convention specifically defined genocide by concrete actions in order to combat this exact type of weaselly logic (ie. you could use the same logic to claim Srebrenica or even pre-final solution Nazi stuff like Kristallnacht wasn’t genocide). Furthermore, there is ample evidence that Israel is purposefully taking most if not all of those specific actions. And given the utter obviousness of some of these actions (ie. >3000 children killed in less than a month, bombing ambulances, killing journalists), I find it hard to believe that he is denying this is genocide in good faith.
Finally, his central argument that settler-colonialism is not a proper frame understanding this conflict is just prima facie wrong. Herzl and other early Zionists understood it and described it as such, the people who steal houses and ethnically cleanse West Bank neighborhoods *today* are commonly referred to as settlers, and the Israeli state both explicitly and implicitly treat all land “from the river to the sea” as their own. Ignoring all the more explicit unsavoriness and the outright smears in this article, the ask of the reader to deny the obvious reality in front of them is probably the most fascist thing about Montefiore’s argument.
One minor correction: Bloys’ first name is Casey, not Corey.
I’ve mentioned them before, but I noticed the sewing club just released a new single and I think they’re in your wheelhouse: https://open.spotify.com/album/3mkvIcAVP6dZvcItmAep1V?si=XIb3mb3cR-KRVRClkGzt2A&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A3mkvIcAVP6dZvcItmAep1V