For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I published my second mock draft of 2025 and held a Q&A that afternoon. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Travis Sykora, Carson Benge, and a few others from that Nats-Mets high-A game. I did see Trey Yesavage’s double-A debut this week but am holding off until I get to at least one more game somewhere so I have enough for a column (Aidan Miller didn’t play in that game so it was really light on prospects).
I appeared on Kauffman Corner with Soren Petro and Rany Jazayerli to talk about the Jac Caglianone callup, the Royals’ 2024 draft, and briefly about this year’s draft class as well.
You can subscribe to my free email newsletter for more content from me, which I’ve sent out three times in a month, not quite at my goal of returning to weekly issues but getting closer!
And now, the links…
- The New York Times published a video feature on a Palestinian girl who escaped an Israeli air strike, finding her in a Gazan hospital and telling her story.
- Also in the Times, this longread on AI chatbots leading users down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes and convincing them of some truly insane things is a horrifying look at where we’re heading. (More links on AI below.)
- Dr. Angela Rasmussen writes about the Bethesda Declaration, an attempt by scientists to rally support for the NIH against the illegal impoundment of funds by its new head, Jay Bhattacharya. There’s a link to sign the petition at the end of her essay.
- Trump announced plans to open an Office of Remigration, using a term associated with ethnic cleansing throughout history. Mainstream media outlets have said little to nothing about the choice of names.
- Trump also cancelled an agreement between the federal government, Washington, Oregon, and local indigenous tribes to protect the Columbia River Basin and restore salmon populations, claiming that it advanced the “green agenda” and other nonsense. The press release sounds like “environment + Biden = bad.”
- This was the week for lazy columns saying that Bluesky is “failing” or something similar despite the platform passing 35 million users and publishers saying repeatedly they’re seeing better engagement there than on Twitter. This blog post on Tedium does a solid job of reacting to those columns without overreacting, making what I think is the key argument: it’s about community, and what Bluesky has in its favor right now is a sense of community that’s been absent from other social media sites for some time.
- NYPD Chief of Department John Chell pleaded guilty in 2013 to departmental charges of misconduct, but that undersells it – he committed tax fraud by using a false identity to hide money he took in from a side hustle. It’s at least the 11th investigation into his actions since he joined the force. He’s the highest-ranking uniformed official in the NYPD. Why is he still employed?
- South Carolina State Rep. RJ May (R), who has previously ranted against drag queens in schools and made false claims about gender reassignment surgery for toddlers, was arrested and charged with distribution of child sex-abuse material. The charges were significant enough that he was denied bond. He founded the state’s Freedom Caucus.
- A Texas man has been charged in a case where he poisoned his pregnant girlfriend with abortion pills. The charges aren’t related to her, though; he’s only been charged with murder for the death of the fetus. The girlfriend’s life and body don’t matter. Texas has a religious-based “fetal personhood” law, under which Justin Banta, who works for the U.S. Department of Justice, has been charged.
- Wikipedia toyed with putting AI-generated summaries atop some of its articles, but pulled them down after a strong negative response from editors on the site. I don’t even care why they did it – we don’t need AI-generated stuff everywhere and too few people are talking about its environmental cost.
- Along those lines, here’s an AI-generated video that shows just how dangerously deceptive these videos have become, and how we’re likely to see them used for phishing and other scams now.
- When this year’s high school graduates in Oklahoma started pre-K, the state ranked 17th in the nation ine education. Now they’re ranked in the bottom three.