Stick to baseball, 6/17/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft, looking back at the 2014 draft class, plus the annual column on first-rounders from that class who didn’t pan out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new deduction game Archeologic, which I thought was too easy to solve and didn’t offer any new mechanics to make me want to play it more.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter last week, detailing my misadventures with travel and phone alarms.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Washington Post is in crisis, but their investigative reporters are still doing good work, this time with a report on police officers who have sexually abused children yet avoided punishment or even prosecution and sometimes retained their badges. They found over 1800 such officers, and in 40% of cases where the officers were convicted they received no jail time.

• Back to ProPublica, which reported on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is using the state’s consumer protection laws to target organizations whose views he doesn’t like. ProPublica also revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas received at least three more free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow, then admitted he should have disclosed all of these junkets. There will continue to be no consequences for any of this.

• Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler reports on how Samuel Alito and his comrades are trying to make the Supreme Court, and the country, more explicitly Christian. Lawdork had a post last month on the Alito problem and Chief Justice Roberts’ refusal to confront it.

• Microbe.TV has a nearly two-hour episode debunking that awful New York Times op ed by explaining why we know that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from a lab.

• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) personally solicited a contribution from FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones back in 2018, after which the firm gave $500,000 to DeWine’s dark-money PAC. DeWine has denied any knowledge of the contribution, but text messages show him actively asking for more cash.

• A Justice Department investigation found that the Phoenix Police Department used excessive force and violated the civil rights of numerous residents of the city. Meanwhile, a woman whose jaw was broken by deputies of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and whose son served in the Army is now facing deportation.

• This Washington Post column from Sophia Laurenzi (which appears to be unlocked) about how she became a death row investigator to try to make sense of her own father’s suicide is beautifully written and avoids any pat answers to these difficult questions.

• Some Texas cities have tried to fight poverty by giving money to people in need, with no strings attached, a policy that many economists have advocated for decades, but of course conservatives are fighting it, just like Jesus would have.

• The American institute for Economic Research has a short post explaining how stadiums are not “magic” when it comes to urban development.

• Meanwhile, the Economic Development Director for Charlotte is falsely claiming that a proposed subsidy for the Panthers’ stadium wouldn’t go to billionaire owner David Tepper.

• Violent crime is dropping at historic rates, according to data from the FBI, even though a majority of Americans believe crime is up.

• Conservative columnist David French wrote about how his church “cancelled” him for his divergence from the views of the modern Christian nationalist movement – notably their unwavering fealty to Trump and opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

• These countries are the most dangerous for LGBTQ+ travelers, and perhaps places you don’t want to spend your money if you’re trying to be an ally.

• CEOs who met with Trump found him meandering and incoherent, which shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s seen video of him speaking at any point in the last year. I imagine they’ll still fund him and vote for him, though, because taxes.

• Astrophysicists have discovered evidence that the Earth collided with a vast interstellar cloud about 2-3 million years ago, which may have affected the development of life on our planet.

• Disgraced singer Gary Glitter, in prison again for violating terms of his parole for previous convictions for sexual abuse of multiple children, has been ordered to pay over 500,000 to one of his victims.

• The four members of R.E.M. were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and sat down with CBS’s Anthony Mason to discuss the honor, their careers, their opposition to a reunion, and more.

• One AI lobbying group is asking Congress to pass a law banning deepfakes and protecting artists’ rights to their likeness.

• The British Medical Journal published a paper that appeared to blame COVID-19 vaccines for a higher excess mortality rate in the last three years, but the employer of the paper’s authors has already come out against the paper’s conclusions.

• Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s government is considering allowing detention without trial for accused terrorists – but only for Arabs.

• Stanford is shutting down its Internet Observatory, which reported on online misinformation and election interference, after attacks from House Republicans and lawsuits from conservatives claiming “censorship.” Renée DiResta, who worked at the SIO, wrote in the Atlantic about her experience at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory.