Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

My recaps of all 30 teams’ draft classes are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, organized by division:

• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I wrote up a recap of day one that ran overnight Sunday into Monday, and my editor Melissa helped compile all of my comments on first & comp round picks as they happened into a single post.

I also wrote up some observations on the Futures Game.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of the push-your-luck game Celestia, which really needs the expansions and promo cards that will come in the redo of the big box version, supposedly out later this year.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: ICE arrested a teenager in Milford, Massachusetts, who was on his way to volleyball practice because they were looking for his father. The arrest mobilized the town to help get him freed through the legal process.

• The Wall Street Journal has the exclusive story of a “bawdy” letter that Donald Trump sent to pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s 50^th birthday.

• Multiple police chiefs and sheriffs in Louisiana have been charged with handing out fraudulent visas to immigrants in exchange for cash.

• ICE and Customs and Border Protection have held a family of five U.S. citizens in custody for two weeks with no contact with other family members or legal representation. We live in a police state, but they’re imposing it on us so slowly that no one seems to notice.

• The Trump Administration also deported a Guatemalan pastor and father of five who had lived in the U.S. for twenty years. The people posting videos of themselves applauding ICE agents need to hear about these stories.

• Israel is destroying civilian buildings in Gaza as part of its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. This is a war crime, by the way.

• Israel also killed six Gazan children who were waiting to fill water containers in what they’re calling a “technical error.”

• A group of San Francisco-area journalists have joined together to form Coyote Media, a worker-owned publication due to start publishing later this summer.

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is fighting public records requests for his emails with Elon Musk because he claims they are too “intimate and embarrassing” to be made public.

• Hugo Award-winning author Paolo Bacigulpi said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio that the future is even stupider than he imagined it would be.

• How stupid? The Trump Administration is spending over $160,000 to destroy contraceptives meant for women outside of the U.S.

• More stupidity: The Secretary of Transportation keeps lying about the safety of the New York City subways. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) finally called him out on it in a hearing that devolved into Secretary Duffy shouting that Nadler was the one lying (another lie).