We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.
I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Does the NIL era mean the end of Ivy League athletics? I think it does, at least as we have known it. And maybe that’s fine.
- Fine, here are some of the better post-election pieces I’ve seen, bearing in mind I’ve skipped a lot of the blame game going around. The New Republic has had the best content in the wake of the election disaster, including Kat Abughazaleh’s story saying the Democrats need to clean out their party leadership after losing to Trump twice in three elections, a Greg Sargent column on how Trump voters don’t realize how he actually hurt the economy and reproductive rights, and a podcast with Sargent and the Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch on Jeff Bezos sucking up to Trump after the election. In The Nation, Elie Mystal wrote what I also believe, that Trump is not a fluke, but that this is what the United States is. In The Atlantic, Lora Kelley wrote about how the economy ended up more important than the issues on which the Democrats focused, including abortion rights and democracy itself. The Texas Tribune wrote about the rightward shift of the southern part of that state. Just before the election, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump needs help, as we had even more evidence that the former and now incoming President might be losing his grip.
- Scientific American covered how catastrophic a Trump Presidency will be for climate action.
- There were some tiny, isolated bits of good news from Election Day, including Arizonans defeating three GOP-led ballot measures to restrict voting rights; my state of Delaware electing Sarah McBride to be the first openly trans member of Congress (I’ve met her and I’m a big fan); and abortion rights passing everywhere except in a rigged vote in Florida, where the ballot measure got 57% of the vote, but the Republicans moved the goalposts to 60%.
- Iowa tried to purge alleged noncitizens from voter rolls after early voting had already begun. Sounds fair. It’s not like they had any warning that an election was coming.
- A court in Maricopa County, Arizona, cancelled the registrations of some voters based on errant information that they had been convicted of felonies.
- The Guardian’s Arwa Madhawi writes that we are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, citing historian Omar Bartov. The Associated Press covered Israel’s renewed attacks on hospitals in Gaza, buildings that Israel has already previously bombed.
- A dismaying story from the Times on older folks giving all their money to scammers while their kids have no way to stop them from doing so. This isn’t people with (diagnosed) cognitive decline or impairment, but people who are perhaps a little more credulous because of their age and unfamiliarity with the digital world.
- NPR has a story on attorney Victoria Burke, who helps victims of sexual assault fight defamation suits filed against them by the accused. Such lawsuits can become a way to silence victims and make it harder for them to come forward or pursue their cases, and Burke has helped expand anti-SLAPP statutes in California to cover these cases.
- Not all tech companies are bad: Apple quietly added a feature to iOS 18 to protect users’ data on phones seized by police from potentially unlawful searches. Phones that have remained in the lock state for four days will automatically reboot to their Before First Use state, making it harder for forensic analysts to break into them.
- Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27th.
- Jason Yates, an evangelical Christian who supports Trump and previously was CEO of the activist group My Faith Votes, was arrested on charges of possession of over 100 images of child pornography. No trans people were involved in the case.
- Jamie Oliver wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it turns out it has some really dated stereotypes of indigenous Australians. Worse, neither he nor his publishers even consulted with anyone on cultural sensitivity to maybe avoid this fiasco.
- A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.
- Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.
- I mentioned the letter urging a literary boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in an earlier roundup; there is now a countering letter opposing that boycott, with hundreds of signatories of its own.
- I had a couple of short links about the shocking and untimely death of Amber Cook, who worked in marketing for several board game companies and was an avid gamer herself, last weekend. Her partner wrote a slightly longer note about her passing and some upcoming events to raise funds for Amber’s young son.
- An 11-year-old girl in Alabama killed herself as a result of bullying, possibly after just one incident at school.
- Two updates on elections in Eastern Europe: Molvoda’s pro-western President Maia Sandu won re-election despite a massive disinformation campaign by Russia, while outside observers say that the election results in Georgia (the country) make no statistical sense. The incumbent Georgian Dream party claimed victory, while opposition parties have alleged fraud and blame Russian involvement.
- A new study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found a correlation between higher caffeine consumption and lower risk of memory impairment. This is just one study, and it showed correlation, not causation, but that’s none of my business (sips tea).
- Rich countries, led by the EU, blocked a proposal to help poorer countries restore their environments at the COP16 global biodiversity summit in late October.
- France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.
- Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.
- The progressive voter mobilization group AllVote sent misleading and/or inaccurate text messages to voters in swing states claiming they had already voted or sending links to the wrong sites for voting information, according to state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.
- Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.
- Nearly 400 people have joined lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at state-run youth detention centers in Washington, with the allegations dating as far back as 1956.
Democrats have gone way too far on many cultural issues, including views not supported by anything close to a majority, at the expense of economic issues. I’d love to see more of a focus on class-based economic solutions, but am less than hopeful after watching most party strategists continue to put their heads in the sand.
Can you specify which “cultural issues” you’re thinking of, and examples of Kamala bringing up those issues herself anywhere on the campaign trail this fall?
Also curious why you think these cultural issues come “at the expense of economic issues.” In many cases, “cultural” issues are inexorably tied to economic issues (ie. health care for trans people).
This feels like a false dichotomy, Mark. Parties are more than capable of raising multiple issues during the course of a campaign.
The Democratic Party leadership has a lot of reflection to do. They win when they let voters pick the candidate, B. Clinton, Obama, & Biden. They lose when they hand pick a candidate, H. Clinton and Harris. If the party had just let Biden run in ‘16, I believe that he wins the nomination and the presidency. He would be wrapping up his second term. Instead, the Trump win in 2016 paved the way for the Supreme Court to have a conservative majority for the next generation.
On to the campaign. Harris’ first mistake was not selecting a running mate from a swing state. Gov. Shapiro from PA comes to mind. Walz didn’t help her in the Electoral College or with appealing to young men. Shapiro likely delivers PA and helps in the remaining “Blue Wall” states. If it is true that PA Senator Fetterman advised Harris not to pick Shapiro, then he has to accept some of the blame for this failure. Another mistake was Harris saying that she wouldn’t change a thing about the previous four years. She should have come up with something. She came across as arrogant and out of touch.
Shapiro would’ve meant that Michigan was a lost cause. If Kamala couldn’t win Dearborn without him on the ticket, I shudder to think how bad it would’ve been with him.
Biden had just lost his son, Beau, in 2016. He chose not to run. No one kept him from doing so.
Is that entirely accurate? I thought Biden had said something at some point about being annoyed he wasn’t picked. I very well be misremembering, or remembering something that never happened.
I believe that the filibuster is a good thing because the party in power doesn’t like it.
I don’t like when one party controls the Presidency, House, and Senate. The party in power tends to overreact and think that they have a mandate.
I believe that nine justices is an adequate number of voices on the Supreme Court.
My opinions on these matters haven’t changed since last week. If yours have, you may have some thinking to do.
Harris rightfully stayed away from cultural issues in her campaign for the most part. I actually think she did better than I expected. The problem was she had taken some very unpopular positions when she last ran and couldn’t provide any good explanations of how/ why she moved on from those.
Why can’t you be specific about what any of these problematic “cultural issues” are?
Also, you keep criticizing “the democrats” for not focusing on economic issues, but here’s the first ten issues listed on the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign website. Can you find a non-economic issue listed here?
Cut Taxes for Middle Class Families
Make Rent More Affordable and Home Ownership More Attainable
Grow Small Businesses and Invest in Entrepreneurs
Take on Bad Actors and Bring Down Costs
Strengthen and Bring Down the Cost of Health Care
Protect and Strengthen Social Security and Medicare
Support American Innovation and Workers
Provide a Pathway to the Middle Class Through Quality, Affordable Education
Invest in Affordable Child Care and Long Term Care
Lower Energy Costs and Tackle the Climate Crisis
I didn’t like Harris as a candidate or her campaign strategy, but your ambiguous criticism seems like the absolutely worst possible response to her failure to win.
@CP
Did the campaign website say how Harris actually planned to accomplish those goals?
Frank, they did, and in much more detail than the Trump campaign provided. As usual, policy specificity wasn’t actually what the electorate was interested in.
@Kevin S.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I did not vote for the president-elect – but I recall hearing that some surveys indicating voters did not feel as though enough specific concrete solutions had been put forth. And, although I thought Harris did very well in the debate, I did not think she gave enough clear answers about her actual plans. I was wondering to what extent that nay have affected voters’ decisions.
I’m not sure how many voters are going to the campaign websites to get specific details of implementations of plans.
“Make rent affordable and home ownership more attainable”. How, exactly?
“Take on bad actors”. Meaning what, exactly?
“Bring down costs”. How?
If the answers to those questions had been more clearly presented to voters, maybe the outcome would have been different.
Then again, probably not. I mean, apparently a lot of people are too uninformed or ill-informed about tariffs to understand that the president-elect’s tariffs plan is nonsense.
I don’t have the stomach right now to place blame anywhere other than on the voters. Maybe Harris could have squeaked out a victory with a perfect strategy. The fact that the election was even close considering the alternative is damning. In the back recesses of my heart, I still held out hope for American exceptionalism. That at our core, we were still freedom loving people. That Sinclair Lewis was wrong. That hope is now gone, and even if the Democrats take over in 4 years and undo much of the damage, that feeling is likely never coming back.
Biden got 81 million votes in 2020; Haris got 72 million in 2024.
Trump got 74 million votes in in 2020; he got 75 million in 2024.
The American people didn’t turn to Trump this time; they turned away from Harris.
Trump lost zero support post-defeat, despite attempting a coup. The fact that he didn’t hemorrhage support is damning. We’re not a freedom loving people if we need a hard sell to not vote for authoritarianism.
The stories on Taylor Cadle and Charlee Tayt Hubbard are devastating. The Polk County Sheriff seems to have much to answer for, and I’m afraid to hear what young boys could say that would cause a 13-year-old to end her life. I have some very personal experience with a suicidal teen and that story could have been my wife and I. Thanks for sharing that one, Keith.
Very funny to see all the usual suspects on that letter against the boycott. When you keep rolling out Bret Stephens, Mayim Bialik, and Gene Simmons (?) over and over, it’s a good indication of how thin actual support is and how unpersuasive the last year plus of Israeli propaganda has been.
A toast to your Comedy and the Novel prof. I took a similarly titled seminar course at a competing institution up north. It elevated my reading and sharpened my critical thinking. Was a breath of sweet, sweet air after being weighted down by the required first-year course ft. Milton, which I took as a heavy-handed attempt to proselytize to a captive audience.
@CP – I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of voters visiting candidate’s websites. I voted for Harris, and really would’ve voted for any non-Trump candidate, but she didn’t exactly make a forceful, positive case for her own candidacy. It was more based on not being Trump. Obviously that wasn’t enough for most voters.
On your cultural question, trans issues is the big one Democrats just can’t seem to get out of their own way with. I know Harris didn’t touch that in her campaign, but her prior statements were used against her. She never explained whether or not her views had changed.
And here we still have the US, with a Democratic administration who has already lost, willfully ignoring our own laws by providing military aid to a state committing gross violations of human rights by denying entry of aid to Gaza. I truly don’t understand the moral and intellectual gymnastics you have to do to see what’s happening and shrug your shoulders. It’s aid, for fucks sake.
Biden and Blinken are reprehensible.
Just a quick note about the iPhone lock-out feature: It prevents police from accessing phones that were seized legally too. It also prevents police from gathering evidence from the phones of victims who are dead, missing, or incapacitated. I’m sure some people think that’s a necessary trade-off if we want to preserve the notion of innocent until proven guilty, but I disagree. It is far more likely to shield criminals and harm the innocent. If information is illegally taken from a phone, the judge can still throw it out of court. And in the event some hard-ass judge refuses to throw out the illegally seized evidence, that makes a fantastic case for appeal. And of course, if the person was innocent, there wouldn’t be any harmful information on there anyway.
Given the various levels of protection against the use of illegally seized evidence, this seems like a “protection” against something that is extremely unlikely in the first place (and again, really only protects the rights of the guilty). But there are many situations where this will protect the guilty, as stated above. I just can’t see any scenario where this is actually a good thing.