Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.

• NPR spoke to a dozen Zambians living with HIV whose access to life-saving medications has been cut off by Trump/Musk’s illegal decision to close USAID’s clinics there. Ending this aid is killing people around the world, and those lives are not somehow worth less than American lives.

• A Mormon therapist who claimed to be able to help gay members of the LDS church has been sentenced to prison for sexually abusing those patients over a 15-year period. No drag queens were involved in the case.

• GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.

• Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior, is mounting a run for Mayor of New York City, and two labor unions just endorsed him despite that history. Eric Adams has been a fiasco, and Cuomo might be worse. New York state taxpayers have spent over $60 million on legal fees for Cuomo since the allegations began.

• The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.

• Gazans arrested by occupying Israeli forces spoke to the BBC about how Israeli forces tortured them while in detention.

• Israel killed a Palestinian photojournalist and her entire family in a targeted strike on their home, weeks before a documentary that features her and her work is set to premiere at Cannes.

• A man attempted to kill Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) by setting fire to the Governor’s home, claiming he was doing it because of Shapiro’s support for Israel. The man’s family says they tried to have him committed in the days before the attack as his behavior became extremely erratic.

• U.S. immigration officers detained an attorney who is representing a student who has been charged for participating in a pro-Palestine protest while he was returning from a family vacation.

• Good people in Tennessee formed a human chain to protect one of their neighbors from an ICE attempt to detain the man despite the lack of any warrant.

• The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.

• Immunologists Daniel Altmann & Angela Rasmussen wrote in Nature on how scientists need to respond to the existential threat against global health and science.

• Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.

• In the New Republic, Parker Molloy wrote about how mainstream media outlets downplayed the mass protests of April 5^th.

• My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.

• Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where my daughter received excellent care multiple times when we lived there and once while we were visiting, folded like a cheap suit and will no longer provide gender-affirming care to trans kids after threats from Trump.

• The Mississippi Library Commission deleted two research collections to try to comply with the state’s anti-diversity laws, continuing Mississippi’s steady march back to the 19^th century.

• RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.

• Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are trying to get the Supreme Court to bring “don’t say gay” to public classrooms across the country.

• A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.

• Put your phone in airplane mode when they tell you too, by the way. It’s not just the law, but it’s better for the pilots and for your phone.