I’m on PTO this week, but a piece I helped report ran at The Athletic this week, with Brendan Kuty taking the lead, looking at why the Yankees took a player in the draft last month who, as a college freshman, drew a swastika outside the door of a Jewish classmate. It’s not about his baseball ability, but what the player, Core Jackson, did to try to convince teams that that’s not who he is as a person, and what the Yankees did to decide they were willing to take him in spite of that. I got the initial scoop, and expected that I would end up writing a straightforward story about a kid who’d done an inexcusable thing – and maybe one that no one would want to discuss on the record. It turned out to be something very different.
Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Gatsby, which is an above-average (and very spiteful) game with a well below-average theme that has nothing at all to do with the great novel.
I wanted to get this posted and the next time I get a window to write I’ll work on my free email newsletter, which you should sign up for because it’s awesome but also it’s free so if it’s not awesome have you really lost anything?
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Scientific American explains how a cure – or at least a life-changing treatment – for peanut allergies may be upon us.
- Hannah Keyser wrote in the New York Times about the system that encourages very young pitchers to throw harder at younger ages, and what the costs may be. Note this quote from Dr. Brandon Erickson, a surgeon who’s performed many UCL repairs: “The harder you throw, the more likely you are to have a Tommy John.”
- WIRED looks at the rising problems for Roblox, as the company faces lawsuits over the lack of moderation and claims that the platform is a haven for child predators.
- A new research brief published by the Housing Initiative at Penn found that cash rental subsidies helped reduce the rate of forced moves and of major housing quality concerns among recipients in a controlled pilot program.
- ProPublica examines just how badly Trump has gutted our public health agencies. It’s worse than you thought.
- A couple of people who look exactly like you’d expect are trying to create a whites-only community in a state where you’d expect it, Arkansas. I saw some negative reaction to this New York Times article, but I don’t think the authors went easy on these neo-Nazis at all – and this is a good example of where sunshine should work as a disinfectant.
- An Israeli official was arrested in Nevada in a sting operation aimed at pedophiles after he tried to lure a police decoy into meeting him for a sex act, as was a local evangelical pastor. Tom Alexandrovich, the director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, brought a condom to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old girl. The Trump Administration intervened to get him released and returned to Israel.
- A Yale epidemiologist and a former CDC employee write in STAT News that the CDC shooting is public health’s January 6th, putting the blame squarely on RFK Jr.
- Colorado has their 17th measles case this year, this one of an unvaccinated child under the age of 5. You can put the blame for that on RFK Jr. and his cronies, too, profiting off years of spewing false information about the MMR vaccine.
- There’s now a cholera outbreak in refugee camps in Sudan, and climate change is making the spread of the disease.
- Trump’s pick to juke the stats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted all manner of insane conspiracy theories on his now-deleted Twitter account.
- Bradford William Davis spoke to Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier (D), who spent two full days round the clock in the Texas Capitol building in protest against Republicans’ extreme gerrymandering of the state, about her action and how it’s the kind of move that more Democrats need to make to show voters they’re actually fighting.
- A Senate probe led by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) found hundreds of reports of physical and sexual abuse at ICE detention centers.
- Eddie Kim, a reporter for the new worker-owned San Francisco publication The Gazetteer, went to report on an ICE kidnapping action and got pepper-sprayed by an ICE officer. They wear masks, they attack the press, all because they know what they’re doing is wrong.
- A Seattle restaurant called Stuffy’s II has to pay $936,000 in fines for violating the city’s ban on indoor dining in 2020-21. Good.
- Harvard Magazine reveals the hard shift to the right among many students at my alma mater. The opening quote, from a current senior named Leo Koerner, absolutely reeks of privilege: He turned conservative because he had to stay inside during COVID? Grow up, buddy.
- I had several links to pieces in WIRED this week, but they also fell for a scammer who sold them AI-authored articles, doing the same to Business Insider and possibly other sites. Both WIRED and BI have taken articles under that byline down.
- More great board game Kickstarters: Keymaster has one up for Hanami, the retheming of my all-time favorite game by Reiner Knizia, Samurai; and Weird City has one up for Satchel Quest, a competitive bag-building dungeon crawl game from the designers of Point salad.