I got sick out of the winter meetings, so I’ve been slacking on the Saturday posts (and blogging and my newsletter in general). Here are the breakdowns I’ve written for subscribers to the Athletic in the last two weeks, at least:
- The Dodgers’ signing of Edwin Diaz
- The Orioles’ signing of Pete Alonso
- The Royals-Brewers trade with Angel Zerpa
- The Red Sox-Nationals trade of two pitching prospects
- The Orioles’ trade for Shane Baz
- The three-team trade between the Pirates, Rays, and Astros
Over at AV Club, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2025, and reviewed the games The White Castle Duel and Trinket Trove.
I have a few writing things to get done this weekend but I really hope to get another (free) newsletter out before Christmas Day. You can sign up here.
I also appeared on the Cubs Weekly podcast with my friend Lance Brodzowski to talk some Cubs prospects and what it might take to get Mackenzie Gore (very, very hypothetically).
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A Mother Jones journalist asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth’s mentor. Serial fabulist Jack Posobiec responded with threats.
- ProPublica looks at the deaths that resulted from the USAID cuts that Trump, Musk, and company celebrated with cake.
- New Humanist looks at Finnish schools’ efforts to teach critical thinking so students can better detect fake news and misinformation.
- Brown alumna Lucy Feldman writes in TIME about why the mass shooting at the university hit her (and so many Brown graduates) so hard.
- Also in Mother Jones, serial plagiarist and Russian operative Benny Johnson has become a major propagandist and content creator for the White House.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) diverted taxpayer funds for child welfare and health care to pay for his own consultants and advertisements, according to a report in the Tampa Bay Times.
- My Congresswoman, Rep. Sarah McBride (D), spoke out about her experience as a trans woman as the House prepared to pass two bills designed just to make trans peoples’ lives hell.
- Ohio Republicans are trying to groom and indoctrinate kids by putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
- Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s social studies curriculum that mandated all kinds of Christian nonsense, noting that the changes were rammed through without adequate debate or public notice.
- Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) encouraged his Twitter followers to follow accounts belonging to a white supremacist and someone who has posted CSAM, and he doubled down when Westword called him out on it.
- U.S. students read fewer books than ever; the article points out that teachers assign fewer full-length books, in part because of the belief that kids won’t read them, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other potential causes are state book bans and don’t-say-gay laws, social media, AI, and a privately produced reading curriculum called StudySync that leans more on excerpts.
- An ICE supervisor in Cincinnati was arrested for trying to strangle his partner, who is at least 22 years his younger as well.
- ICE arrested a woman in Minnesota merely for observing their agents arresting someone and asking what they were doing.
- Plastic pollution is on track to double by 2040, entering the soil, the oceans, and of course, our bodies.
- A proposed data center in Chandler, Arizona, won’t disclose how much water it expects to use. You know, in a desert.
- NPR looks at Syria a year after the fall of Assad.
- Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Grassfed is “a farm to tabletop” game from the publishers of Ascension and Shards of Infinity, and Chess Joker is a new game from Carl Chudyk, co-designer of Glory to Rome and designer of Innovation.