I had a fourth mock draft go up Saturday morning for subscribers to The Athletic and then updated it on Sunday (same URL), following one I published just this past Tuesday. I also wrote up short capsules on fifty more players who might be drafted this week, beyond those on my top 100. I recapped Saturday’s Futures Game with notes on the standouts and a couple of disappointments. And I wrote up a scouting notebook on some guys I saw in triple A and high A games the previous week, including Cam Schlittler and Konnor Griffin.
At Endless Mode (formerly Paste Games), I reviewed the light tile-laying game Flower Fields, which reminded me a bit of Patchwork, but less tense and for up to four players rather than just two.
I really meant to get a newsletter out last week but never had time enough to write up the first half (the part that matters). Anyway, sign up here for free and I’ll try to do one after the draft dust settles.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter describes the celebrity-impersonation scams that proliferate on social media, and how those celebrities may be the best hope for fighting back against this scourge.
- Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, described the horrendous conditions there in a story on how difficult it is for Gazans to secure food from one of the few distribution centers. Meanwhile, the IDF bombed a queue of mothers and children lining up to receive nutritional supplements in Gaza, and it appears that Israeli ‘settlers’ in the West Bank beat an American citizen visiting family there to death. I’ve seen no comment or demand from our federal government about his murder yet.
- The New York Times has an in-depth story on a woman who kidnapped her daughter after her divorce, because in the 1970s courts would not award custody to mothers if they were gay. The piece focuses on the child, who has very mixed feelings about what her mother did and how it altered the course of her life forever.
- The family of a Northwestern University Professor who killed herself during a (dubious) federal investigation into whether she was some kind of spy for China is suing the school for contributing to her declining mental state.
- The author Gary Shteyngart visited the country of Georgia and wrote about its food and sights for Condé Nast Traveler.
- A few months ago, Texas Republicans voted down a bill to improve local disaster warning systems, such as tornado and flood sirens.
- The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan asks why The New York Times appears to be trying to take down Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, focusing on the paper’s recent story about what she calls a “made-up scandal.”
- I included a link on John Wilson, who was running for executive of King County (WA), getting arrested for stalking and violating a restraining order, in the links a week or two ago; this week, charges were dropped, but he also ended his campaign.
- Rare good news on the vaccine front, as NBC News reports on some states, mostly blue ones, trying to end the fake ‘religious exemptions’ to school vaccination requirements.
- That’s important because, as this BMJ piece notes, the vaccine-denial movement is threatening global health.
- Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) loves to talk about what a strong Christian he is, and has attempted to bring religion into government since he took office a decade ago. His wife announced this week she’s filed for divorce because he keeps cheating on her. Thou shalt not, or something like that.
- Paste explores how AI-generated content is drowning the publishing industry in slop.
- The Intelligencer explains how a combination of changes at Google, Twitter’s self-destruction, and AI have led to a traffic apocalypse for media companies.
- The Guardian has a story on just how dangerous choking during sex is, even as the practice seems to be becoming more prevalent – and it’s almost always women being choked, of course. The whole story made me feel very old and creeped out.
- Libraries in Kent, England, have been instructed by the Reform-led council there to remove any trans books from their shelves if they might be seen by children. There are many problems here, but the most fundamental one is the idea that books about trans people – or other LBGTQ+ people, or Black people, or Jewish people – are inherently inappropriate for children. They’re not.
- Some board game Kickstarters of note: Allplay has one for Sail Legacy, a legacy version of the cooperative two-player trick-taking game; and Restoration Games has one for a storage solution for players of their Unmatched card-game series.
The anti-Mamdani legion of Democrats annoys me so much. This is a young politician who actually seems to excite young and disaffected voters and some circles seem to be making him a pariah at the expense of proven scumbags like Adams and Cuomo (I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton). Doing so just causes more young liberal voters to not like Democrats as much. Mamdani’s explanation for the admissions “scandal” makes perfectly reasonable sense. Shame on the Times for smearing him. Also shame on the Bill Ackman crowd for now jumping to Adams because they know he can be bought. They’re actually proving the point of voters who complain about how rigged and corrupt the system is.
I’m just here to say that Bill Ackman is one of the worst people in the world. He talked down the market in March 2020, contributing to panic selling, without disclosing that he had shorted the market, so he made billions off of it. And then there was his utter hypocrisy when his wife was outed as a plagiarist. He’s a cancer on our society who’ll never be held to account because he’s absurdly rich. His endorsement is a black mark.
God I hope he wins. Final nail in NYC coffin.
You want to see the largest American city, home to over eight million people, dead and nailed into a coffin? What is wrong with you? Why do you hate America?
DeWine vetoed a similar line item in the Ohio Budget Bill to the Kent b.s. that would disallow displays of trans books. We’ll see if the idiots in the statehouse — idiots may not be a strong enough term — decide this is worth overriding his veto.
I live in NYC and have read the NYT my whole life.
The reason they are panicking isn’t that hard to suss out. It’s a combination of his support for Palestine and because he represents a departure from our ossified political class and status quo. And because they have been so vocal about their distaste for him, his resounding primary win shows their waning influence, particularly on municipal matters.
But when you’re carrying water for the current regime, openly transphobic, and utterly unwilling to entertain that you may be out of touch with where the median Democratic voter here is, it’s just easier to double down. But it’s looking increasingly desperate, and they are throwing out whatever reputation they had left. They’re no longer a paper for New Yorkers, and haven’t been in some time.
Anyway, I ranked Brad Lander #1, but I’ll be pretty excited to fill in my bubble for Zohran come November. I hate Cuomo with every fiber of my being. When he beat Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 primary, I wrote in my sister’s name in the general.
Did Mamdani have a “resounding” primary win? He was the first choice of a 44-percent plurality of the subset of registered Democrats who voted. Calling that “resounding” sounds like when Trump and his minions claim that he won a historic landslide victory in 2024 even though more people voted against Trump than voted for him.
It was an 11 way race with ranked choice voting and he won by 10 points. That’s pretty resounding.
Pretty sure Trump won the popular vote in ‘24
Yes, Mike, he won the popular vote with a plularity, not a majority. 50.2 percent of voters chose someone other than Trump. 49.8 percent of voters chose Trump.
*Plurality.
To Brian in NoVa:
He won the 11-way race by 7.7 points, not 10 points.
@Brian in SoCal — yes, a 12-point win in the Democratic primary in a 7 to 1 Democratic city is pretty resounding, particularly when most of the establishment and $25M in outside money was against him. You may not agree or like the outcome, but you can’t redefine its scale or its meaning.
Of all the things to pick out from my comment, that’s an odd one. Do you disagree with anything else?
Yeah he literally got more votes than any other Dem primary candidate in history, in a crowded field no less. “Resounding” is if anything an understatement
I actually haven’t stated any opinion about the outcome, Malcolm, nor do I have one. Although I grew up in New York City, I haven’t lived there in 28 years and I am in no position to tell its residents which candidate is best-positioned to address the issues facing the city. The fact of the matter is that Mamdani was the first choice of approximately ten percent of registered New York City voters. There are about 4.7 million registered voters in New York City; Mamdani received 469,000 first-choice votes. Looked at differently, a majority of Democratic primary voters (56.18 percent) opted for someone other than Mamdani. It sounds like puffery to call that resounding, and it seems of a piece with Trump’s misplaced bragging about the scale of his victory.
With respect to the comment that I “can’t redefine [the] scale or… meaning” of Mamdani’s victory, um, sure I can. I can make an objective determination based on the facts just as much as you can. And who “defined” the scale that I’m supposedly redefining in the first place? You? Well, others may see it differently.
@ Mike – yes, Trump won the popular vote with 77,302,580 votes but 77,935,722 votes were cast for candidates other than Trump, which I believe is Brian in SoCal’s point.
@Brian in SoCal — sorry, my reply button seems to be missing, but in response: fair enough that you can have your own opinion of the scale and meaning of his victory. Perhaps I was a bit too hasty and glib there.
It’s just that a lot of bad faith actors here are looking to diminish his win for their own motives. And while it is true that there are significantly more registered voters in the city than the number of first-choice votes he received, I think it’s more relevant to look at the results of previous primaries to determine the scale of his victory.
In the last primary, which was the first to use RCV, Eric Adams won in the 8th round by fewer than 7500 votes. In this primary, with the money and powers that be aligned against him, Mamdani won in the third round by over 80,000 votes. That’s a big difference! And the ‘resounding’ win I referred to was said primary.
And to your point about 56% voting for someone else, that’s a feature of RCV. As I said, I did not rank him first; but that’s because RCV allowed me and many others to craft a ballot that allowed us to for all intents and purposes vote for him while still showing support for others. Without RCV, I would have just voted for Mamdani because he was the main challenger to Cuomo. Given the cross-endorsement of Lander and Mamdani, it’s likely many others would have done the same. We haven’t seen the vote flows yet, but it’s a good bet that most voters with Lander at #1 would have their votes flow directly to Mamdani at #2, and Lander came in third place.
So I look at 56.4% vs. 43.6%, and call that resounding. As you say, others are free to see it differently. Looking purely at R1 votes distorts how people use RCV.
@Malcolm regarding your reply to Brian in SoCal:
“And to your point about 56% voting for someone else, that’s a feature of RCV. As I said, I did not rank him first; but that’s because RCV allowed me and many others to craft a ballot that allowed us to for all intents and purposes vote for him while still showing support for others.”
Yes, exactly.
I hope people saw this important point. Ranked Choice Voting is Crucial, and an important step toward moving away from the duopoly that often gives us the “lesser of two evils”.
Let’s not diminish RCV (in a race with this many candidates on the ballot) by referring to the percentage of 1st place votes the winer received. That defeats the purpose.
Here is what I am seeing, someone please correct me if I am mistaken:
With 11 people on the ballot, Mamdani received 43.82% to Cuomo’s 36.12%.
There were 1,071659 votes cast.
Receiving 43.82% of the votes in an 11-person race, while finishing 7.7 percentage points ahead of the number-2 vote getter, seems like a strong win to me.
Whether we call it “strong” or “resounding” or any other adjective really just comes down to how we define those words.
In the final tabulation, which I understand to be a simple comparison of where the voters ranked Mamdani relative to Cuomo, Mamdani won by 12.78 percentage points.
That seems significant to me. 56.39% of the voters preferred Mamdani to Cuomo.
How can this possibly be compared to the 2024 presidential election? That result wasa 49.8 to 48.3.
Strongly agree, even with the caveat that’s it’s hard to compare ranked choice to our national shitshow. The DNC is so inept. If they really wanted to put forward an ‘establishment’ candidate, there had to be a better candidates than Cuomo.
@A Salty Scientist — they could have just coalesced around Brad Lander, the comptroller. Leftish, experienced, knows the budget, etc. I mean the man filmed a video of himself in a suit eating a hot dog while riding in the front row on the Cyclone unperturbed!
@Frank, I completely agree. I’ve run candidates in muti way races. If there were 5 or more candidates (and at least 3 semi serious ones) and we got 40+% with a margin of more than 5 points, we were calling it a big win.
@Salty, that’s what gets me. If your choices are Eric “I never met a bribe I wouldn’t take” Adams, Andrew “I’ve got a million skeletons” Cuomo, and anyone else who is halfway serious; you go with the semi serious candidate not named Adams or Cuomo. This shouldn’t be complicated. The fact that establishment people are trying to coalesce Adams and Cuomo is embarrassing.
The direct comparison has already been stated. In both instances, the winning candidate was the first choice of a plurality of those who voted. And, in the New York case, it was only a primary where less than a quarter of eligible voters turned out.
@Brian in SoCal — the turnout doesn’t fucking matter. I can’t believe we’re still arguing about an adjective I used and you’re bringing out plurality vs. majority as if we didn’t know the difference.
Malcolm, it matters if you’re trying to claim that Mamdani’s performance reflects a level of broad-based appeal that other candidates trying to win votes in other jurisdictions should be striving to emulate. That’s an open and important question. And perhaps I’m a little sensitive to claims like these in a time in which we are daily gaslit by claims by the president and his spokespeople that he won a historic, landslide victory that gives him a mandate to do the things he does. By the way, why are you so angry? I understand that there are bad-faith actors, like you’ve mentioned, who want to undermine Mamdani for their own purposes. I’m not one of them. I’m an independent voter who sees the Republicans for what they are, a cult that cannot be trusted to exercise power as currently constituted, headed up by a malignant narcissist and pathological liar who also happens to be an ignoramus. I would like the Democrats to regain power because they’re the only party capable of responsible governance. I’d like to see them put up candidates who are well-positioned to win. Maybe Mamdani is such a candidate. But I think that’s far from clear, and I don’t think it’s helpful to, in my view, overstate the significance of the level of support he attracted in the primary.
With respect to why “we’re still arguing,” I was responding to a question Frank asked. With respect to majority/plurality, there was literally someone in the thread who apparently didn’t understand the difference and, again, it was directly relevant to the question Frank posed. If it’s inconvenient for the version of history you want to tell, that’s not my problem.
@Brian in Socal — I was mostly just feeling an exasperated ‘come on’ but yeah in retrospect, that doesn’t come across well in comments.
We’re talking past each other a bit, I think. We share the same goals: fascists out of power, politicians who at least try to help in.
I made no claim that politicians should emulate Mamdani or his platform. I only relayed my frustration that actors with ulterior motives are downplaying how big of a deal it is that he won.
He was expected to lose handily. Even the best polls had him losing the plurality in the first round, and maybe squeaking out a win in the eighth. He got a plurality in the first and won in the third. On the ground here, it is so clear that it is a big deal. It is in the ether. You can see it in the reaction of the Ackman class.
We’ll see in the election in November. Mamdani might lose! But I just think it’s disingenuous to discount a primary win because that’s just how elections here (both NY and the country) work. Not that many people vote. We still get to use adjectives to describe those wins or losses.
Honestly I just wanted to vent a bit about the NYT at the start, because I revered it growing up.
Since I didn’t offer my actual thoughts on what I think people can learn from Zohran, they would be: be authentic; don’t equivocate; don’t be Gavin Newsom.
As a resident of California for as long as Gavin Newsom has been in politics, I think you’re being unfair to him. We can agree to disagree. But on the point about authenticity, isn’t Trump’s whole appeal– and it’s ironic, since he’s an inveterate liar– that he’s “authentic”? That’s what his supporters say they love about him. But yet he equivocates all the time.
@Brian in SoCal — Sorry, compadre. Asking me to get into the mind of a Trump voter and make sense of the thought process is a step way too far 🙂
I guess what I mean is that, from conversations I’ve had with people here, even if they don’t agree with every policy he supports (and I disagree with some myself, namely free buses), he comes across as someone who isn’t poll testing everything. He has his point-of-view, seems ready to listen and adapt, but doesn’t abandon his general principles. Given the last four years here with Adams, and given everything Cuomo was, is, and always will be, that is refreshing.
I also think the voters of these two parties may evaluate authenticity, reality, truth, etc., differently. On this point I imagine we definitely agree.
As far as Newsom, I didn’t pick him as a target because you live in California; I’m really just quite angry at how he’s abandoned trans youth and adults because he thinks that’s the way the winds are blowing. I cannot ever support someone who would do such a thing. I’ve followed him since he was mayor of SF and it’s just hugely disappointing.