At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.
For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: WIRED’s Katie Drummond interviewed Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince, who has some wildly progressive views on content, AI, and the future of the Internet.
- In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote how pundits and politicians are sanitizing the legacy of Charlie Kirk.
- The Times reported on two deals that allowed the Trumps to pocket billions from their cryptocurrency while giving the U.A.E. access to computer chips.
- Guardian columnist Helen Pidd attended the far-right rally in the UK led by white nationalist Tommy Robinson and wrote that this dangerous movement is only going to grow from here.
- Quanta explains an unsolved problem in computer science for the longest-running six-rule computer program, known as the Busy Beaver Challenge.
- Defector reports on the sketchy goings-on at the Savannah Bananas’ charity arm.
- NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.
- The Washington Post, formerly a great American newspaper, fired editor and columnist Karen Attiah for speaking out about gun violence in the wake of the shooting of Kirk.
- Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, according to a UN Commission report released this week. Undeterred, Israel continued moving ground forces into Gaza City, displacing thousands more Palestinians.
- Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.
- Disney’s decision to bow to the Trump Administration and take Jimmy Kimmel off the air is further evidence of the assault on the First Amendment. So are the dozens of teachers and professors fired for their comments on Kirk and his death.
- Meanwhile, even though Kirk’s (alleged) murderer was a white man, Black Americans are receiving death threats over it, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.
- Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ reached out to all 48 Illinois college instructors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” and detailed the harassment they’ve received as a result, including death threats.
- The Department of Education is ending discretionary funding to multiple grant programs for colleges that primarily serve minority students, because DEI.
- The attorneys general of nine blue states have joined the National Women’s Law Center to pledge to fight to protect the rights of trans students, just as the ultra-right Heritage Foundation wants the Administration to brand trans activistists as terrorists.
- Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen at the macroscopic level until now.
- Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.
Nobody is going to jail over the Charlie Kirk comments. Businesses are allowed to terminate employees. This cuts both ways across political affiliation. Is the Right currently being hypocritical? Of course. But firing a teacher isn’t violating the first amendment. Those people are still free citizens and still have the right to say whatever they want about Charlie Kirk.
Tell that to Jimmy Kimmel. His firing was the direct result of pressure from the FCC towards the affiliates.
There are plenty of first amendment protections for private speech that outweigh the interests of employers. Otherwise, how could you even purport to call it “free speech.” This is easy to Google. In fact, here, I just did it for you: https://bbgohio.com/practice-areas/first-amendment-law/free-speech/government-employee/
Read your link. I don’t think any of the three tests here protecting employees apply.
Please explain how examples like this don’t qualify for those standards: https://x.com/pblest/status/1968510261322547273
If that’s the only thing that woman said I agree she shouldn’t have been fired.
Are you saying that as long as no one goes to jail, no one is violating the first amendment? Because we are talking about parts of the government, like public schools, firing people only because of what they said. Seems like a textbook first amendment violation
I’m saying being employed isn’t promised by the first amendment
Being fired because the government pressured your employer to fire you is indeed contrary to the first amendment. Like having the FCC threaten ABC. It’s definitely a gray area for public schools when one gets fired over private speech. Which is one of the things tenure at Unis is supposed to protect (and is one reason some conservatives are anti-tenure). The FCC intervention seems rather textbook to me. That’s a big difference from public backlash alone leading to a firing.
I’m not really talking about Kimmel. I’m talking about people who were fired for saying Kirk deserved to die or they were happy he died. I have no sympathy for anyone who says someone deserved to be murdered
Mike, I have no sympathy for people who express a whole range of distasteful but legally-expressed opinions (your callousness towards 1A among them), but getting fired from a government job or having government officials pressure a private employer to fire someone because they expressed one of those opinions is still against 1A protections. Thankfully the law doesn’t come check with either of us to see if we appreciate the opinion being expressed or not.
Also, Mike, I’d guess an overwhelming % the US population reacts positively to the death of someone they consider a despicable enough villain; maybe it’s a child rapist killed in the prison system or a drone strike on a boogeyman terrorist or whoever else falls within their personal “worst guy” category. I’m not arguing that the ubiquity of this type of sentiment makes it morally correct, but that almost no one truly believes it’s wrong to take some pleasure in “a bad guy dying,” so in that case could really just say “I have no sympathy for anyone.”
What’s almost always actually being argued instead is “this guy was/wasn’t bad enough to qualify” and that’s an entirely different discussion.
Glee over the death of anyone is repulsive to me. I don’t believe in the death penalty and I don’t think anyone should be deprived of life (exceptions being acts of war and genuine instances of self defense). The idea that you could possible hate a stranger so much that you’re happy they are dead is truly an emotion I cannot comprehend.
The thread begin with your claim that “firing a teacher isn’t violating the First Amendment,” and then you followed up by saying “I’m saying being employed isn’t promised by the first amendment.” You’ve moved away from that discussion here – do you agree now that some of these firings are 1A violations? The government can’t fire you or threaten your livelihood over your speech. A private company can do so, within reason, for your speech, and their ability to do so varies depending on the state.
I also don’t think glee over someone’s death is necessarily the same as “hat(ing) a stranger.” If you think someone is committing grievous harm in the world, and only death will stop them, is that hate for a stranger, or desire for the greater good? I’m sure millions of people wished Hitler dead during WWII, because his very existence led to the deaths of somewhere around 50 million people. That’s a very extreme example, but I think someone could adopt an internally consistent position in lesser cases.
@keith – I certainly agree that political speech is and should be protected and that some of the firings were likely unlawful. I think anyone who was fired for celebrating Kirk’s death deserved what they got in terms of losing their job, especially anyone who teaches children.
As far as the Hitler reference, sure there is a line there somewhere. But Charlie Kirk, along with any other US politician, falls far short of that line for me. I consider anyone who is truly celebrating his death to be a pretty horrible person.
I think anyone who was fired for celebrating Kirk’s death deserved what they got in terms of losing their job, especially anyone who teaches children.
I couldn’t disagree more, both on the specifics and on this spiteful worldview.
So, what this comes down to is …. a couple hundred years after the first amendment was written, we’re still arguing about what the amendment means.
Yeah, we’re all fucked.
I’ll just say this:
I would think Charlie Kirk, if we are to take him and his supporters at their word, would support the right of people to lambaste him for his shitty worldview and statements.
As a Georgian, I find myself in the odd position of probably supporting a Republican refugee for governor. Plenty of reason to side-eye some of Duncan’s policy positions (i.e. abortion, which he “got wrong” previously), but being a meaningful and effective political resister to Trump makes him a rare bird. And the other Democratic hopefuls are hard for me to see breaking through in a statewide election here.
“ MAGA activists have criticized Attiah and others for misquoting Kirk and taking the comments out of context. Kirk was not discussing Black women in general, but was referring to four specific women: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson; former first lady Michelle Obama; liberal pundit Joy Reid; and Sheila Jackson Lee, a congresswoman from Texas who has since died. His suggestion was that by admitting they had benefited from affirmative action, they were essentially confessing to not being able to reach their posts through merit.”
Thank you, CBC, for allowing the myth of meritocracy to go unchecked and lending credence to the spurious foundation on which Kirk’s remarks are built…