Stick to baseball, 5/24/25.

My first Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft, is now up for subscribers to The Athletic; I held a Q&A on Thursday to take questions about it and other prospects. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook from my recent looks at Andrew Painter, George Lombard, Jr., Jhostynxon “The Password” Garcia, Mikey Romero, and others.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Diatoms, which has some incredible art and high-quality components, and almost plays too quickly – I wanted a few more rounds to keep building patterns.

I’ve now sent out two issues of my free email newsletter in the last two weeks, which I think counts as a streak.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read this month is this San Francisco Chronicle story by their food critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, about her experience eating at The French Laundry and how chef-owner Thomas Keller treated her. It is nuanced, thoughtful, and ultimately allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.

• The Columbia Journalism Review has an extensive investigative report on the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against journalist Wesley Lowery.

• The Guardian has an excerpt from the new book that their reporter Dom Phillips was writing when he was murdered, along with indigenous Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira. The two were investigating the illicit destruction of the Amazonian rain forest and the threat to indigenous peoples in the region. The book, How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers, will come out on May 27^th.
  
• The New Republic has the full story of the state-sponsored executions of four American nuns in El Salvador in 1980. The Reagan Administration, by the way, kept gaslighting the public by claiming the nuns were secretly communist sympathizers or activists. Today they’d just claim the nuns were MS-13.

• AI’s energy consumption is completely out of control, surpassing cryptocurrency mining and massively increasing carbon emissions from big tech firms.

• Trump tried to stop Harvard from taking in any students from outside the U.S., and Harvard sued and immediately got a temporary injunction. Do not comply in advance.

• A man shot and killed two Israeli diplomatic staff near the Jewish Museum in DC in an apparent act of terrorism. He later shouted “Free Palestine” after his arrest. Reuters has more on the victims and the suspect.

• The Administration is trying to intimidate progressives in Congress with the charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver. Progressives need to stand up and fight for her, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.
  
• The vaccine denialists running the FDA are saying they won’t approve COVID boosters for healthy people under 65, despite all of the evidence showing those are effective and no evidence showing they’re not safe.

• Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal stumbled on a technique used in Europe to help facilitate communication between pilots on commercial flights and prevent accidents … but it’s not used in the U.S.

• Matthew Cherry won an Academy Award for his short film Hair Love, which then turned into a book and an animated series on HBO Max. He’s now working on a new short film, an animated musical project called Time Signature, and has a Kickstarter up for it.

• An unusual genetic mutation explains the coloring of orange cats, but it doesn’t explain why they are completely bonkers.

• My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, reviewed a new video game called Despelote that is about sports but not specifically a sports video game. It sounds fascinating.

• Two new boardgame Kickstarters this week: Tangerine Games has one for Sauros, a dinosaur-themed trick-taking and tile-laying game.

• Board & Dice, which specializes in heavy Eurogames, has one for a new edition of Trismegistus, which is very highly rated on BGG but also has a game weight rating of 4.18/5.