Stick to baseball, 7/5/25.

I posted my final (mostly) Big Board for the 2025 draft this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and then held a Q&A to take questions on it on Wednesday.

Paste Games is now Endless Mode, still under the Paste umbrella, but its own site with more coverage of all things gaming, which will include about twice as many stories from me each year. My first story at the new site is a review of the 2024 reprint of Gold West, a great, family-level strategy game that went out of print with the demise of publisher Tasty Minstrel Games.

I’ll try to get another issue of my free email newsletter out this upcoming week, before the draft drowns me in content.

I appeared on Seattle radio to discuss the Mariners’ farm system and possible draft picks this week, and talked mostly Orioles prospects and the draft with Ryan Ripken on his Youtube show.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter explains that Pixar’s Elio, which is on pace to be the studio’s biggest box-office flop ever, was stripped of some key thematic elements in what appears to be an attempt to remove queer-coded parts of the film and make the main character more “masculine.” The only Pixar films to fail to reach $100 million in domestic box office gross were the ones affected in some way by the pandemic (Onward, Luca, Soul, and Turning Red); Elio is at $49 million after two weeks, and saw a 44% decline from week 1 to week 2.

• This investigative report from The New York Times looks into how Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, current Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates and owner of the Manchester City football team, consorts with violent rebel leaders and guides his country’s efforts in various foreign wars, all while avoiding serious scrutiny from western press.

• Futurism looked at incidents of “ChatGPT psychosis,” where people using the energy-hogging AI tool descend into madness, believing the software is telling them deep secrets about the universe or communicating from beyond the grave or other nonsense. There are no guardrails around these LLMs and clearly no will at the federal level to even consider them.

• Also from Futurism, an AI slop story in three parts: They broke down how the artist Velvet Sundown, which had racked up over half a million streams on Spotify, almost certainly did not exist; they ran a follow-up where the ‘band’ claimed they weren’t just an AI fabrication; and they had the last word when the clown behind the scam admitted the music was all made by AI.

• The Guardian, of all places, has one of the most thorough takedowns of the Athletics’ abortive attempt to move to Las Vegas, where no one has even broken ground on a new stadium.

• The BBC has the story of a man who was stalked and harassed for years by a preacher at his church after he rejected her advances – and where the bishop didn’t believe him, of course.

• It was not a great week for the New York Times’ coverage of Zohran Mamdani, but this editorial by M. Gessen nails how Mamdani’s opponents cover their anti-Muslim bigotry in the veneer of claims that he’s antisemitic. Gessen points out that Mamdani is the only mayoral candidate who has spoken about real antisemitism and the costs it imposes on Jews in New York and beyond.

• The Times also investigated conditions at the “tropical gulag” in El Salvador where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was held – and apparently tortured.

• This story from Tiernan Cannon at Paste is the best assessment of the Bob Vylan kerfuffle at Glastonbury and the related, ongoing controversy over Kneecap. I will only add that I saw more stories on the BBC’s site about what Vylan’s vocalist said than about the IDF dropping a 500-pound bomb on a Gaza café, which may be an actual war crime.

• A couple of rich homeowners in King County decided that some very old trees were blocking their view, so they had the trees cut down. Except the trees were on public land, and no one is taking responsibility for the actual destruction.

• Surprising no one, researchers found that support for anti-trans laws and policies is tied to the rise of authoritarian sentiments and the desire for others to conform to your own views. Religiosity is also correlated with transphobic beliefs, of course.

• Oregon state Rep. Greg Smith (R) may have used his position in the legislature to raise his own pay as executive director of the Columbia Development Authority.

• King County, Washington, Assessor John Wilson is running for County Executive and said last November that “the foremost challenge facing the county is we’ve got to do something about crime.” He was arrested this week for stalking his ex-fiancée and violating a restraining order.

• Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Council, Paul Ingrassia, has ties to antisemitic and white nationalist extremists and has shared a 9/11 conspiracy video.

• Vox’s Unexplainable podcast talks to Dr. Marlena Fejzo about her work to identify the genetic factors behind morning sickness – and the lack of funding to find a cure.

• Seeing this story about a new life form found in tar on a ship that docked in Cleveland just two days after I saw 28 Days Later for the first time does not give me warm feelings.