For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft column, looking back at the 2015 class, along with the companion piece on the first-rounders who didn’t pan out. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
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And now, the links…
- Longreads first: GroundUp has the first part of a series on the Mozambican children that President Trump has left to die by decimating USAID. No one who claims to be pro-life, or Christian, or even remotely human can support this atrocity. It is a genocide in slow motion.
- That Brevard County sheriff who threatened to kill protesters just a day or so because the Minnesota assassinations has a long history of racial profiling and corruption.
- This piece is from 2022, but I found it while looking into the band Tulip, whose latest single popped up on a Spotify playlist. Turns out their origin story is fascinating – the two leads were married to other people and members of a conservative evangelical church, then fell in love and were excommunicated. They left the church and formed a symphonic metal band.
- North Dakota voters voted to create an ethics commission that could hold officials accountable for violations. Some of the state’s Republican leaders are trying to emasculate it. I wonder why.
- Meanwhile, Texas wasted $2 billion in taxpayer money building part of a border wall, which is about as useful as part of a wall tends to be, at least at keeping something out.
- ICE is trying to deport a Texas woman who is married to a U.S. citizen, arresting her when she returned to the mainland U.S. from her honeymoon in the Virgin Islands. Ward Sakeik is considered ‘stateless,’ as she was born a refugee and arrived in the U.S. on a refugee visa when she was 8. The federal government wants to deport her to Israel, even though she has never been there or in Palestine. This is not someone who arrived here illegally, or overstayed a visa, or committed a crime.
- A flag that’s popular among Christian nationalists flew over the Small Business Administration building this past week, in case you’re still confused about what’s really happening.
- Two Michigan parents let their baby girl die of jaundice because they believed God would heal her. They’re going to prison, in part because they’ve said they’d do the same thing all over again. They belong to a Pentecostal church that preaches faith healing, but the church apparently doesn’t proscribe seeing doctors.
- Delaware’s Senate, which is currently controlled by a Democratic supermajority, is really getting down to the key issues confronting us today, as they passed a resolution that they should look and see if public schools are at a disadvantage in athletics.
- Harvard Magazine explains the university’s conflict with the Administration and what’s at stake in the fight. One of my classmates, Joanna Weiss, is the magazine’s new editor.
- This column from the Seattle Times (syndicated from the Washington Post) claims that there’s a simple fitness test that’s highly correlated to your future life expectancy. I can do it but definitely wobble a little on the jump back up. I think that’s still a 9.
Rex Huppke writes that we need to take healthy policy-making away from RFK Jr., as his plans are going to kill people. My Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester (D), issued a statement decrying his decision to fire all of the smart people on the ACIP vaccine-advisory committee and replace them with a group of Minions.
- Congressional Republicans are about to kill the Grad PLUS loan program for graduate studies, further trying to wipe out the U.S.’s substantial advantage in higher education and eventually driving shortages in important fields like engineering.
- JK Rowling called the Scottish newspaper The National “anti-woman,” so the editor of the paper, Laura Webster, responded.
- Astronomers at CalTech and Harvard may have found the answer to where all the missing matter in the universe is. Turns out it was just behind the couch.
- Stonemaier Games announced the summer release of their newest title, Vantage, an open-world, cooperative, exploration game where players have all crash-landed on a planet and can communicate with each other but can’t see anyone else’s locations or views.