At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: WIRED has the most comprehensive look so far at the “digital coup” being staged by Elon Musk and his DOGE toadies.
- A doctor at Brown Medicine went to Lebanon to visit her family, and on her return, she was – and still is being – held at Logan Airport for deportation.
- The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett spoke to the Mennonite father whose six-year-old daughter died of the vaccine-preventable disease known as the measles.
- A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.
- Two professors at my alma mater argued in The Harvard Crimson that it is time for the university to stand up against the Trump regime, and then wrote a similar piece on Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s continued silence.
- More Harvard news: former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke at Harvard Business School and joked that he’d give pagers to people protesting the war on Gaza, a reference to the Israeli government’s murder of several dozen people in Lebanon via exploding pagers.
- Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) deliberately misgendered my Representative, Sarah McBride (D-DE), leading her to refer to him as “Madam Chair” and for ranking Democrat Bill Keating (MA) to actually stand up for her, something Democrats have barely bothered to do since Republicans started their attacks on her.
- Robert Morris, a megachurch pastor in Texas who was a “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child. He was a major force behind Texas’s bill banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms, arguing that it would – get the irony – protect children from sexual abuse.
- Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.
- Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.
- A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.
- Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.
- Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.