My entire offseason prospect rankings package is now up for subscribers to the Athletic, and you can find links to all 33 lists/articles on this index page. If you just want the highlights, here’s the top 100, the farm system rankings, and the two Q&As I did around the package on February 12th and January 28th.
I reviewed the family board game Fairy Ring over at Paste about two weeks ago; it’s really great, easy to learn for kids 8 and up, but with enough mental calculations on each turn that it has enough to keep adults engaged. My review of Harvest will go up this week.
I got back to my free email newsletter in the last few weeks, and hope to get back to posting more regularly on the dish as well now that the mad rush of the prospect rankings is over.
There were way too many articles to link to since my last roundup to include them all, so here’s a quick list of high (or low) lights…
- Longreads first: Doesn’t matter much now, but RFK Jr. still espouses the same bullshit anti-vaccine and conspiracy theory views he did before his nomination, no matter how much he tried to dissemble and deny in his confirmation hearings.
- This may also be a bit out of date already but the American Association for the Advancement of Science published an inside look at the devastation going on inside the NIH, NSF, and other federal science agencies.
- The BBC exposed how MI5 lied to a court to protect one of its agents who had a history of abusing women.
- The New Republic profiled Rep. Sarah McBride (D), my representative in Congress and the first openly trans Congressperson in either chamber.
- The Society for the Study of Evolution issued an open letter to the President and Congress on the current scientific understanding of sex and gender, a small but important gesture against the Republican Party’s relentless war on trans people – which included a threat to pull all federal funding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children if the group didn’t remove all mention of trans kids from their site. And the cowards complied.
- There’s a big measles outbreak in a county in Texas with a very low vaccination rate, a direct result of the right’s attack on the extremely safe and effective MMR vaccine. Measles can kill and maim children, and some people who recover will die years later from an incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
- A baby died and over 50 people fell ill from a pertussis outbreak in Greece. Pertussis is also vaccine-preventable, although its efficacy depends even more on herd immunity than measles does.
- Shutting down USAID is already threatening to help an Ebola outbreak continue spreading in Uganda. The idea that contagious diseases will respect borders is yet another fiction of the anti-science crowd (some of whom don’t believe viruses exist at all).
- A 29-year-old woman died from a chiropractic “adjustment” that tore an artery. That thing where chiropractors crack your neck? It’s dangerous and totally useless. Chiropractic is woo. It’s based on a ghost story, not any actual science or evidence.
- Paul Krugman spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about why he left the New York Times.
- WAMU has a story on the new American board game craze, although I dispute the “new” part.
- A writer for the Federalist and The Daily Wire who claimed queer people were “grooming” children has been arrested for molesting a child under the age of 12. Remember that if you buy anything from U-Line, you are funding the Federalist.
- A judge in upstate New York was forced to resign after he tried to get out of jury duty by claiming anyone accused of a crime must be guilty.
- The title of this New York Times op ed keeps changing – I have it saved on my phone as “Why Would We Undermine the Marvel of American Science,” now it’s showing up on my laptop as “I Used to Run the N.I.H. Here’s What Worries Me,” and Chrome shows it as “American Science is Under Attack” in my history. Whatever the title, it’s worth a minute. The wholescale assault on American science research will destroy American health and wreck our economy, which depends on innovation since we have long lost our competitive advantages in manufacturing.
- Yes, everyone should boycott Tesla. At this point, if you’re buying a Tesla, you are openly choosing to side with the guy.