Stick to baseball, 8/9/25.

At the trade deadline, I broke down the following trades for subscribers to The Athletic:

• Alex Call to the Dodgers/Dustin May to Boston
• Shane Bieber and Louie Varland to Toronto
• Camilo Doval to the Yankees
• Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Laureano to San Diego
• David Bednar and Jake Bird to the Yankees
• Mason Miller and JP Sears to San Diego
• Eugenio Suárez to Seattle
• Michael Soroka to the Cubs
• Ke’Bryan Hayes to Cincinnati
• Ryan Helsley and Tyler Rogers to the Mets
• Jhoan Duran to Philadelphia
• Seranthony Domínguez to Toronto

I also posted a midseason ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors, held a Q&A about it, and wrote up a scouting notebook on Travis Bazzana, Braylon Doughty, and some other Cleveland and Baltimore prospects.

At Endless Mode, I ranked the ten best new games I saw at Gen Con and also ran through everything else I saw or played at the convention this year. Prior to that, I reviewed the game Big Sur, and wrote a feature story on the effects of the Trump tariffs and economic uncertainty on the board gaming space.

I appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss the brief callup of Jen Pawol to become the first woman to umpire an MLB game.

Now that this post is done, my next writing assignment is my free email newsletter, followed by a pair of reviews for this site.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: New York’s Intelligencer has the story of the one-man takeover of the Anti-Defamation League, where CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has hijacked the organization to back Donald Trump and attack anyone who criticizes Israel as antisemitic, while abandoning the organization’s storied history of standing up for the rights of all minorities and oppressed people.
• Gizmodo wrote about the “end of work as we know it” due to the rising use of AI, even with serious deficiencies in the technology. Whether we’re ready or not, the workforce is about to be hit hard by the fever dreams of a small number of tech bros.
• The Huffington Post spoke to Jerce Reyes Barrios about the abuse and torture he suffered in five months in El Salvador’s CECOT, where the U.S. is sending people suspected of entering the U.S. illegally. We are all complicit.
• Guards at the ICE detention center in Miami made migrants there kneel like dogs to eat, with their hands shackled. Abu Ghraib taught us nothing.
• Phil Williams of WTVF/NewsChannel 5, one of the best investigative reporters in the country, exposes the investors backing the construction of a Christian nationalist community near Gainesboro, Tennessee.
• Remember all the stories last summer about Joe Biden’s mental status? Donald Trump “has trouble completing a thought” and has rambled on in nonsensical answers, often entirely off topic, reports Adam Gabbatt for the Guardian, quoting several experts who say the President is showing signs of dementia.
• Brown caved to the Trump Administration, and now the university is “functionally inaccessible” to trans students.
• NPR ran a series of stories on the problems posed by defunct oil wells across the southern and western United States, starting with one about how we don’t even know where they all are.
• Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) introduced a measure to set cognitive standards for members of Congress, which, of course, was quickly rejected. There are more members of Congress aged 70 or older now than there have ever been.
• The Forward explains that the starvation in Gaza is indeed Israel’s fault.
• Some Senate Democrats finally took a stand by calling for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel’s ineffective Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel created after kicking the UN out of Gaza, due to the mass starvation happening in the territory.
• Israel is taking over Gaza City and has announced plans to occupy the entire Palestinian territory. It’s an invasion and an illegal annexation, no different than Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia invading Bosnia.
• Meanwhile, the New York Times has devoted more articles to attacking mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani than it has to the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, including the mass starvation and the war’s creation of over 5000 new child amputees in the territory.
• An Israeli “settler” in the West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian activist who was involved in the production of last year’s film No Other Land. The Israeli military claims that the shooter was a civilian who responded with gunfire when a group of Palestinians threw rocks.
• A far-right Israeli politician said Israel needed to take a cue from Adolf Hitler and wipe out all Gazans.
• In June, the publisher of the Harvard Educational Review abruptly cancelled the release of an upcoming issue dedicated entirely to Palestine.
• Israel has held an American teenager in prison for five months on charges he threw rocks.
• The walkout by Texas Democrats isn’t going to work. It may pay some dividends for the party locally and nationally, but it’s not going to stop the gerrymandering.
• Luzerne County, Pennsyltucky, cancelled the scheduled appearance of Philly band Low Cut Connie at a festival because they claimed the band’s music contained “politics and propaganda.” I thought cancel culture was bad?
• Jess Grose writes in the New York Times about how social media has further corrupted the already commercialized American childhood, spurred by the Benson Boone Crumbl cookie, which is an actual phrase that unfortunately makes sense to me.
• Jacksonville police used deadly force in a routine traffic stop of a Black man, including repeatedly punching him and smashing in his window, despite the fact that he never fought back in any way – and local prosecutors cleared the cops of wrongdoing.
• The Spotify catalogs for some dead artists have seen “new” songs that are AI-generated added in recent months; the Futurism story blames Spotify for creating them although it’s unclear who’s actually doing it.
• The President of the Utah Senate, Republican J. Stuart Adams, pushed fellow Republicans to lower the state’s age of consent to help out a family acquaintance charged with statutory rape. I don’t see why Democrats would ignore this: The Utah Republican Party is actively helping pedophiles evade punishment.
• The wife of Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) wrote a racist romance novel. Apparently it’s quite bad, on multiple levels.
• RFK Jr. cut a $500 million federal program to continue developing mRNA vaccines, the technology behind two of the main vaccines against COVID-19, offering the potential for vaccines against some cancers and many other diseases. His explanation was full of pseudoscientific bullshit.
• Some countries still believe in science: Brazil is about to release swarms of mosquitos infected with a Wolbachia bacterium that prevents the virus that causes dengue fever from multiplying – and that then gets passed down to the mosquito’s offspring.
• People who find their minds wander during simple tasks may be better at pattern recognition.
• Misgendering and deadnaming are no longer considered hate or harassment on LinkedIn. Why would any site ever make an active choice to permit hateful behavior?
• Philadelphia city schools found a way to keep students learning even when federal funding evaporated this summer.
• Dan Pelzer kept a log of every book he read for over 60 years, and when he died last month at age 92, his tally was at least 3,599 books read in that span. For comparison’s sake, I’m 52, my list goes back at least to high school, and I’m at 1,988 books read. At my current pace, it’ll still take me at least 20 years to catch up to Pelzer’s total, assuming … a lot of things.
• The India Board Game Designers Collective has a Kickstarter up where you can get three print-and-play games for $9, delivering in September. I backed it.