I had two posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, on the signings of Anthony Santander and Jurickson Profar. My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball will go live on Monday morning; the content is all written but I am still tweaking the final order.
At Paste, I reviewed the game Gnome Hollow, a medium-weight family game of tile placement, set collection, and some market selling, along with gnomes. I liked it but I would say I didn’t love it.
I did send a short newsletter out to subscribers earlier last week; you can subscribe here for free and get the next one, which I hope will go out Monday/Tuesday to go along with the unveiling of the top 100.
As the social media landscape has lurched to the right, I’m posting links on several sites but only posting other content or answering people on Bluesky, so if you want to interact with me that’s the spot.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Molly White writes in her newsletter, [citation needed], about Elon Musk’s and the right’s war on Wikipedia, a source of information they can’t easily control.
- An independent journalist is going to trial over her coverage of the police response to a pro-Palestine protest at Portland State University. Alissa Azar has already been convicted once for her work, as the police claim she’s not a journalist, but “antifa.” How convenient for them.
- Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, said that defending democracy would amount to “abandoning its central role as a source of impartial information.” His comments, made to a former colleague of his now at Semafor, didn’t go over well.
- Just days after a (so-called?) cease-fire in Gaza, Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin. La plus ça change.
- I hate to link to the dumpster fire that is Politico, but they have a good piece on how RFK Jr. might try to remove vaccines from the market entirely if he’s confirmed as HHS Secretary. And his buddy Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote for him. If you live in Rhode Island, you need to call Sen. Whitehouse’s office on Monday morning.
- Florida has benefited from net positive migration for years because of its weather, cheap real estate, and general economic growth. That may be changing, as more people left Florida in 2023 than any other state but California. Climate change and the state’s hard-right shift are likely causes.
- My former colleague at the Athletic Lindsey Adler has a newsletter of her own now after she left the Wall Street Journal, and her latest issue, “Ten Years in a Crumbling Industry,” is an excellent look at her decade in (mostly) digital media and what it’s been like to work in a field that’s imploding around you like the Hamptons sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
- Character.AI has been in the media more for problems with its software, including one user’s suicide after he became obsessed with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, than for anything good about the product. So why would any media brand want to partner with them?
- Jeb Lund writes at Truthdig that AOC ’28 needs to start now – not necessarily because she’ll win, but because she is the right person to stand front and center as the leader of the opposition to the President. And I agree. I don’t think concerns about “electability” are even relevant any more; Trump should have been the most unelectable candidate ever, and he just won his biggest victory yet.
- At Slate, Dan Kois writes about The Straight Story, David Lynch’s most conventional film, and an absolute fucking masterpiece.
- Outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentence Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The federal government withheld a ballistics report that showed the fatal shots did not come from Peltier’s gun, and no witnesses identified him as the shooter.
- Support our troops! But don’t give them houses! Oklahoma scrapped a plan by the Veterans Community Project to build tiny homes for homeless veterans in Oklahoma City after neighbors objected. I bet they stand for the anthem, though!
- Elon Musk made a Nazi salute at the inauguration, twice. We know that’s what it was because neo-Nazis online said so – and they loved it.
- Greg Sargent of the New Republic says that Trump allies are conceding they don’t have a huge “mandate” after all. I’m not sure this means much if no one is willing to stand up to him.
- The New England Patriots set up a Bluesky account and the NFL told them to shut it down. Then the league announced a new partnership with Twitter.
- The Columbia Journalism Review has a story on how the White House press corps is looking forward to a second Trump term. It’s the most effective way I can think of to make someone hate the media. The people they spoke to do not care who’s hurt or what the long-term effects on the country might be, as long as their individual jobs are easier.
- One of Trump’s barrage of executive orders tried to erase the existence of trans people. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. No one benefits from this – certainly not the very women who such orders are supposed to protect, not as their rights to basic medical care are also under assault.
- Another order froze pretty much all business at the NIH, which is going to seriously impact critical scientific research on things like cancer treatments and disease prevention. NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies fund all kinds of research into medicine, mental health, and other areas of science that have helped keep the American economy among the world’s strongest and driven continued improvements in global health. That’s all at risk now.
- The American Association of University Professors put out a statement called “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” Do not comply in advance. It’s not hard to remember.
- We have a new Fabio Lopiano (Merv, 3 Ring Circus) game up on Kickstarter, called Baghdad: The City of Peace. I love Lopiano’s games – they’re medium-heavy but manageable – and this one looks like it’ll have great art similar to that of Merv, which I own and have played just once but kept because it’s so gorgeous.