Stick to baseball, 12/6/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my analyses of the Sonny Gray trade; the Dylan Cease signing (featuring a massive temper tantrum by Jays fans in the comments); the Cody Ponce & Devin Williams signings; and the Jhostynxon Garcia-Johan Oviedo trade.

At AV Club, I reviewed the game White Castle Duel and wrote up my weekend at the PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, right after the holiday.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of another woman killed by Texas Republicans and their anti-abortion crusade. Just worth noting that the unholy marriage between Christians and the anti-abortion movement is an entirely modern creation, not supported by the Bible or the previous 1700 or so years of Christian thought.

• Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and lifelong Methodist, writes in the Guardian of how Trump and his allies are doing to America what they did to Christianity – subverting their meanings and destroying them from the inside.

• Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that the ending of USAID funding has already killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.

• Princeton Prof. Robert P. George, a highly influential conservative philosopher and legal scholar who was in the news recently for his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation, spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academic thought and the growing ‘illiberalism’ on the far right.

• Also in ProPublica, a Minnesota pediatrician who challenged the methods of the director of the child abuse team at the state’s primary children’s hospital says he was sacked for speaking out. The director in question, Dr. Nancy Harper, appears to still use debunked ideas like “shaken-baby syndrome” and thus overdiagnoses child abuse, separating children from families without sufficient cause.

• Twitter turned on location identification for its accounts, and shocker of shockers, a huge number of self-proclaimed MAGA accounts are based in Pakistan or Morocco or elsewhere outside the U.S.

• Prof. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School who authored the memos authorizing the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps in 2004, writes that the U.S. strikes on boats in the Atlantic are murder even if you assume all of the government’s claims are true.

• I won’t link to too much about the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, given how much attention it’s received and the fact that Vanity Fair finally undid its mistake in hiring her (although whoever approved that hiring needs to be held accountable for the decision), other than this New Republic piece on the public-health cost of Nuzzi’s utter lack of ethics.

• Speaking of which, Kentucky has reported its third infant death in the last year from pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease; all three infants were unvaccinated, as were their mothers.

• Michael Scherer writes about the delusions of RFK Jr., who is dismantling public health in the face of all available evidence and massive pushback from the scientific community.

• Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in the Times about her experiences attending an anti-vaccine conference and why these grifters and liars are so easily able to capture people’s minds.

• Scientific American has a somewhat related story about how AI chatbots could sway voters’ opinions even when the bots were fabricating ‘facts.’

• Drew Magary writes that it is time to declare war on AI, and I couldn’t agree more.

• Government bans on the use of puberty blockers for trans teens set a dangerous precedent for further intrusion into individual health-care decisions.

• Concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is backing a referendum to overturn Maine’s protections for trans students. National media members need to stop calling her a “centrist.” She is as extremist as the rest of the party.

• Drain the swamp! Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who had served just two weeks to date for his role in defrauding investors of $1.6 billion through his private equity funds. The corruption is coming from inside the White House.

• Tennessee libraries have begun shutting down to purge books that Republican theocrats wish to ban because they contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

• I’m absolutely stunned that a Turning Point staffer and Arizona city councilwoman has been accused of sexually harassing another TP employee – and kidnapping his daughter when he rebuffed her. People that obsessed with others’ sex and sexuality are telling you something about themselves.

• The government of the Caucasus nation of Georgia sprayed anti-government protestors with bromobenzyl cyanide, a toxic form of tear gas introduced by the Allied Powers during World War I, according to a report from the BBC.

• Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an order that would ban any city agency heads or staff from doing pretty much anything in line with the BDS movement against the government of Israel, just a month before the door hits him on his way out of Gracie Manson in four weeks. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani could undo this with a similar order, but of course there will be an outcry calling this antisemitism if he does.

• Europe’s water reserves, especially those in southern Europe, are drying up due to climate change, while Tehran is approaching day-zero for water.

• There’s a new Kickstarter from Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games, publishers of the solo game Resist!, for Queen of Spies, another solitaire game, set this time set during World War I.

• Mike Drucker’s parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus is note-perfect.