I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.
- The Guardian’s long read explains how an extremist, bigoted rabbi who died over 30 years ago holds sway over leaders at the top of the Israeli government.
- M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.
- One more – The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last rants about how it was never about trans women in sports, and how we should just leave trans people alone.
- A 6-year-old girl died of the measles in Texas, because her parents are part of a religious cult that has largely rejected vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement has pounced and is using the death to further press their own dangerous bullshit.
- Columbia University bent the knee to President Trump over $400 million in funding. Their endowment, by the way, is about $15 billion. This is an active choice, not a financial necessity.
- Prof. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor of bioethics at Columbia, coincidentally, wrote an editorial for Nature calling on scientists to stand up against the war on DEI.
- Three prominent conservatives were arrested just this past week for child sex crimes. The issue is not trans people. It was never trans people. Here’s more on the Minnesota Republican, who spoke out against teaching kids about sexual orientation and gender identity back in 2016. (It’s not limited to right-wingers, though; a Democratic party official in Florida was arrested a few weeks back for the same.)
- The Mississippi Free Press reports on deaths and injuries resulting from no-knock raids in that state.
- Dark energy might be weakening, challenging cosmologists’ understanding of the way it works and threatening the standard model of the universe.
- SpaceX’s Starship ships keep blowing up – and it will never work because of Elon Musk, according to journalist Will Lockett.
- I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.
- From my colleague Carson Kessler: MLB may be ending its Diversity Pipeline Program to try to comply in advance with the new Administration’s anti-DEI crusade.
- A math problem known as the Kakeya Conjecture has been solved after 117 years.
- Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.
But, Keith, the whole point of an endowment is never to spend it! (Yes, I’m being sarcastic. It’s absurd that these schools have these hoards of cash and still charge obscene amounts of tuition.) (Yes, I know that some schools, e.g., Harvard, do defray or even waive tuition for some less well-off students, but still.)
Columbia is being cowardly full stop, and they should tell the Trump Administration to pound sand while letting their legal team do their jobs.
That said, I’m going to push back a bit on the endowment* narrative, which has also been co-opted by MAGA as a reason to reduce indirect costs and otherwise curtail federal research dollars going to universities. First, the endowments are not one large slush fund–they’re a bunch of smaller funds that often have strict strings attached on how they can be spent. Second, Columbia gets ~$1.2B in annual federal funding for research, with over half of that being NIH funding. Even with a $15B endowment, it’s not sustainable in the long term to use that endowment to fund all research. Sure, in the short term, they can likely float research while fighting the Trump Admin. But in the long run, that would dwindle the principal, and I’m sure they’re rightfully worried that they may see very low or even negative investment income due to Trump’s economic policies.
*Full disclosure, I’m at a moderately, er, well-endowed public R1 university.