I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.
Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.
I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: You’ve probably seen the Politico story on the incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and generally hateful group chat featuring a bunch of adult Republicans, including a state Senator from Vermont who’s since resigned.
- Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (not my employer) about how AI slop is taking over the internet, stifling or threatening to stifle real creativity. He’s casting about a little for an analogy; it’s just Cory Doctorow’s enshittification write large. (Link is free to read.)
- Mother Jones exposes the hacking software company First Wap, whose products use SS7 to track phone users anywhere in the world, without requiring that they click on a malicious link or otherwise put some sort of tracking app on their phones.
- ProPublica found that ICE has held at least 170 U.S. citizens against their will so far, in many cases physically abusing them, and I’m sure that’s an undercount. The site also reported that Kristi Noem took campaign donations from a dark-money group for her personal use.
- The Athletic (my employer) has a story by Carson Kessler and Gabby Herzig about catfishing scams that convince men they’re talking to top women golfers, eventually conning them out of thousands of dollars and posing new safety risks to the athletes from men who think they have romantic relationships with them.
- An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.
- Starving children screaming in agony: the inevitable result of the Trump Administration’s devastation of the USAID program.
- Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…
- Christian Pastors Gone Wild: A Utah youth pastor says young black men should be executed and cites the Bible in his arguments … a former South Carolina pastor was sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found over 5000 CSAM images on his phone … an Ohio pastor who said that being gay was a “health risk” and that gay literature made him “sick” has been arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these stories.
- Indiana University fired its student newspaper’s advisor, then shut down the newspaper entirely because the students were publishing … news. Purdue students stepped up and distributed 3000 copies of their own paper, with the front-page headline “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” on IU’s campus.
- The Guardian reported on the justified backlash against comics who took the Saudi dictators’ money to play the Riyadh comedy festival.
- Former anti-vaxxers told Raw Story that they’re “horrified” by RFK Jr’s gutting of the American health system, including eroding Americans’ trust in vaccines (which are, again, highly safe and effective). Meanwhile, measles cases continue to rise across the U.S.
- And hundreds of anti-science bills have hit state legislatures as evangelicals and ‘do-your-research’ loons try to make America die of preventable diseases again.
- A viral story about an Olive Garden waitress who threw breadsticks at customers is fake … but uses the identity of a real person, with her picture, and it’s made her life needlessly difficult.
- Texas police who said they used a network of license-plate cameras to try to track the safety of a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Turns out, of course, they were actually trying to track her so they could charge her with murder.
- Professor Lisa Moore, who heads the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, writes that she doesn’t recognize the place where she’s worked and taught for 35 years.
- Two Harvard professors wrote that the school must reject the Trump Administration’s so-called “compact” and take a public stand against it.
- This is how you report on the President: “Clueless Donald Trump, 79, Humiliated After Dodging Legal Question.”
- Did President Trump push Israel to accept a ceasefire to protect his own financial relationships with the Qatari emirate?
- As Trump spends $130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom at the White House – which he is not allowed to do without Congressional approval, not that they’ll stop him from doing anything – a typhoon destroyed villages and killed at least one person in Alaska.
- Data centers make bad neighbors. If they’re trying to build one near you, speak out against it.
- An El Paso family claims a Border Patrol agent shot and killed their dog during a search; the incident took place in September and ended up in the national news earlier this month, but I can’t find any more recent update.
- Kevin Howley, a writer and media critic, writes about the harm of the “fact-free anarchy” that has taken over public discourse in the U.S. with the full complicity of the mainstream media.
- Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.
- The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.
- Your brain adjusts to doing things you think are morally wrong, so that doing the same sort of thing again becomes easier and easier. The good news is you can go in the other direction by doing the right thing, and make it easier to be honest or brave or otherwise virtuous.
- Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.
- Boardgamegeek has an entertaining designer diary from two of my favorites, the folks behind the new game The White Castle Duel, as well as the original The White Castle and The Red Cathedral.
Hey Keith,
Completely random question from left field: have you (or anyone who cares to respond) thought about capitalization specifically and grammar in general as you’ve been online more? I noticed that you seem to have adopted internet caps style on Bluesky and was just curious about it. I think a lot about this stuff because I teach English, and I used to attempt to write everything “properly,” but I’ve definitely shifted depending on the audience and exigence. I haven’t gone so far as to shut off auto caps, but I’ve thought about it for my phone. Interestingly, when I talk to my hs students, they’re unsurprisingly indifferent, but most of them are sort of like”changing the default settings on your phone seems like too much, but we really don’t care.”
It’s almost entirely a function of the awful auto-capitalization feature on iPhones. I had to turn it off because it capitalized too many words that didn’t need it. After that I just gave up worrying about capitalization on social media. I happen to think it better suits the informal and typically extemporaneous nature of the medium, but really it’s because Apple’s product sucked.
What exactly is “internet caps style”?
As someone who has worked as an educator, I would expect my students to use proper standard capitalization in formal writing assignments, just as I expect them to write out actual words rather than writing “FWIW”, “IMHO”, or other internet lingo or shorthand.
Chiming in as a current Prof. Yes, I expect students in formal writing to use standard capitalization and not abbreviate or use slang. Informally and online, I personally use ‘text” style shorthand, and IDGAF what students do outside of class (even if it were possible to police that). My hope is that K12 educators are teaching my future students formal writing, because I’m in pedagogical trouble if I have to do that for junior and senior college students and/or graduate students.
Like A Salty Scientist, I am a Professor (in Chemistry), and I do expect some level of competence in formal writing skills coming into the university. We teach a Chemistry literature class designed to help develop critical reading skills, and our upper division (i.e. majors) labs are all writing intensive. None of that is designed to be remedial in terms of the basic writing skills (capitalization, grammer, competent construction of a paragraph). I also work to remind my students that they need to use proper capitalization, a formal salutation, complete sentences, and a closing in their emails to faculty and other staff. That skill is important (still) in the business world many of them wish to join.
I also personally default to the informal style when communicating with my own children and others who grew up with texting as a standard form of communication.
My wife (also a Professor, English) is an editor of a nationally recognized journal, and it is incredibly hard for her to find good interns and other student workers with the skill set she needs.
Let me offer a slightly different POV, which may be unexpected because I have been a professional journalist for nearly 50 years, and I prayed at the altar of the AP Style Guide from the time I was 18. Like most Boomers, the particulars of proper writing were drilled into me from grammar school forward; spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and contextually appropriate tone of voice were essential. However, I have spent the bulk of the last 20 years doing marketing for both major corporations and millennial-inspired startups. I can tell you that there are a lot of “new rules” when it comes to writing for the business world. Yes, we certainly still must spell words correctly and not use inappropriate language when writing for a C-suite audience. But more and more people in the business world today have grown up with what you might call a “relaxed” perspective on writing and presenting information to audiences. Simply put: We must keep in mind who we are writing for and what kind of tone we are trying to convey to the audience. Sometimes, a more formal and traditional method is appropriate and necessary, while other occasions not only allow for “younger” writing styles and tones of voice, but actually demand it.
Yeah, I took it as obvious that students should have a sense of voice and context when writing–my fault for not making that more clear.
Early in my career, I did feel a calling to “keep the flame” as my mentoring teacher called it when I student taught. To me that meant all my writing, regardless of context or audience, had a certain responsibility to be “proper.” So, to that end, I attempted to be grammatically correct in all my texts, emails, and (later) social media posts. That sense has abated for a variety of reasons as I’ve gotten older.
One reason I have been thinking about this is that I’ve noticed more . . . let’s call them professional writers? or maybe smart people who know different?. . . communicating in internet caps style. While I understand that someone like Jamelle Bouie or Corey Atad or Annie Abrams or Keith Law (sorry, just scrolled the feed quickly) don’t write that way formally, I think it’s interesting that they choose to write that way publically (to the extent we can call someone’s social media account public writing?).
For what it’s worth though, there’s more to this than “the damn kids weren’t taught right and what’s wrong with their English teachers?” For example, I think that given that current president’s inability to use capitals in any sensible way on his social media feed actually makes space for someone to use caps even more intentionally to create meaning, though I’m probably projecting too much poetry discussion on that. This article is one I’ve used in class that dips a toe into the discussion: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-capital-letters-why-gen-z-loves-lowercase
I guess I’m more asking about social media posting and the choice to change caps style. It seems that Keith has adopted more of a lowercase style on Bluesky and I was curious about that choice.
Just chiming in… my father was the chairman of the English department at a large Midwestern university. Forty years ago (!) he began a cross-departmental program to urge professors to grade on the comprehension of their students’ writing. Most instructors agreed with this initiative, but some protested.
It’s not necessary to use the King’s English at all times, and in fact it’s unfair to ask students to know the grammar and construction rules that professionals use, but it is absolutely right to expect our leaders to at least communicate intelligibly, although communicating intelligently may be to much to ask of this current administration.
“…as did Jim Jefferies after he said: “One reporter was killed by the government … unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.”
I figured this had to be sarcasm a la the Vinny Thomas TikTok, but nope. Stunning.
As a graduate of IU’s J school the treatment of the IDS is sad. I read it religiously and was even published a couple of times. The fallout is echoing the Kimmel fiasco:
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2025/10/27/iu-alumni-pull-donations-over-ids-student-newspaper-censorship-claims/86851411007/#
This comment is now so quaint: “$130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom.” They are now saying $300M and my money is on $1B, given that they pulled down the whole East Wing.