Stick to baseball, 5/17/25.

I had one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, a minor league scouting notebook on some Yankees, Nats, Rays, and Orioles prospects; it’s rained just about every day since then, so I haven’t been to a game since Sunday (despite trying, twice, only to have the games cancelled after I was at or nearly at the park).

I did finally send out a new issue of my free email newsletter this past week, and I’m going to try to get back to doing that weekly now that my spring travel appears to be done. I think I ended up in 15 different states this spring, seeing over 70 guys who are legitimate draft prospects along the way, and of course I’m still annoyed at a few I missed (like Gavin Kilen, who was hurt the weekend I went to Knoxville).

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Trump Administration pressured African countries to give more business to Elon Musk, according to this report from ProPublica. All of the other stuff is a distraction – all of the funding cuts, the hate laws, the executive orders are there to suck up the oxygen so we don’t notice that they’re using the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. Like with this Amtrak project that Musk’s Boring Company is probably going to “win.”
  
• Meanwhile, Musk’s attempt to take over the Copyright Office flopped because of opposition from conservative media companies and content creators, who, as it turns out, do have some principles when it comes to protecting their own bottom lines.
  
• A preprint that appeared last fall that claimed that materials scientists who had access to AI tools were substantially more productive – and that received publicity from credulous reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere – was almost certainly a complete fabrication. MIT issued a press release this week saying they had “no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper” and that the author, former graduate student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was no longer affiliated with the school. The link above argues that the paper was full of red flags, including impossible access to corporate data and too-good-to-be-true results.
  
• Alex Shephard says in the New Republic that Trump is the most corrupt President the U.S. has ever seen.
  
• Political scientists who study the decline of democracies say that the United States is sliding towards autocracy in the way that other previously-free countries like Hungary and Turkey have done in the last twenty years.

• A pharmacist at Oak Valley Health in the Toronto area turned out to be one of the people behind the now-shuttered MrDeepFakes.com, one of the biggest sites for nonconsensual pornography. May he never know another moment of peace.

• Another tick-borne disease is on the rise in the U.S., including the mid-Atlantic. Babeosis mimics malaria symptoms and is carried by the same species of tick that spreads Lyme disease.

• Moderna’s combination COVID and flu shot outperformed current vaccines against both viruses in trials. Will the denialist in charge of HHS stop its distribution in the United States?

• Doctors at CHoP & Penn Medicine used gene therapy to cure a newborn of a rare, often fatal metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency. It’s the first successful application of a new type of gene-editing protocol that could save thousands of lives if it can be adapted for broader use.

• Bad headline, good story: Scientists are trying to figure out why the universe didn’t annihilate itself due to the interaction between matter and anti-matter in the moments right after the Big Bang. If it had, though, maybe we wouldn’t be keeping a dead woman on life support to comply with a theocratic abortion law.

• A prison guard in New York admitted that he cleaned up the blood after his colleagues beat inmate Robert Brooks to death. This week was the first I’d even heard about the story.