Stick to baseball, 2/21/26.

I was on PTO from Wednesday to Wednesday, so I haven’t written anything new on the Athletic in nearly two weeks. I’ll begin draft content this upcoming week.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed two smaller games with surprising depth and complexity for their size in Oddland and Neko Syndicate.

I appeared on Sox Machine to talk about the White Sox’ farm system and a little more about Colson Montgomery.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday.

And now, the links…

• ProPublica got a hold of letters written by children being held in one of ICE’s concentration camps. The camp’s Schutzstaffel responded by raiding the facility to destroy any further missives. Meanwhile, a group of pediatricians wrote about the harm that ICE detentions are already doing to children. Remember that when anyone tells you they’re concerned about, say, what bathroom a person uses because of “the children.”

• The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper explains why Democrats should defund ICE and CBP permanently. The Nation’s Andrea Ritchie says essentially the same thing.

• ICE agents zip-tied a 14-year-old girl in Idaho in October during one of their ‘raids.’ She is a U.S. citizen, but that’s beside the point.

• Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has been all over the harms propagated by the AI sector and the amoral actors pushing the technology. Her latest piece looks at how ChatGPT is fueling and encouraging stalkers, because these LLMs are nothing more than compliment machines – they tell you what you want to hear. Well, that, and plagiarism.

• The Guardian exposes just how Substack profits from all the neo-Nazi content it hosts.

• A new study published in Nature found that X/Twitter users who had the For You feed turned on saw their political views shift to the right, but turning it off did not move them back towards the left (or center).

• The Heritage Foundation published a “roadmap” for the country that is really a playbook for a Christian nationalist future; Jessica Valenti exposes this under the headline “they’re coming for our daughters.” I can’t describe the Heritage Foundation’s worldview as anything other than sick. It is a diseased way of looking at women and humanity as a whole.

• Israeli settlers shot and killed an American in the West Bank. No one will do anything about this.

• The far-right elites in Texas are backing MAGA candidate Don Huffines for state comptroller as he promises to “DOGE Texas government.”

• Meanwhile, the self-immolation of Texas’ public universities continues, as UT-Austin is consolidating four departments relating to Black, Latino, and women’s studies, a move that appears motivated by ideology; and all University of Texas schools now must limit discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. I wonder who decides what is “controversial.”

• I am shocked, shocked to note that cryptocurrency is now being used to facilitate human trafficking.

• A brainwashed mother in South Carolina whose unvaccinated son is hospitalized with complications from the measles told The Independent that she still wouldn’t vaccinate him. There is no risk from vaccines even close to what that poor kid has already suffered, and what he’ll suffer in the future if he survives.

• The FDA’s site removed pages that exposed fake autism treatments like MMO (bleach) and raw camel milk.

• However, the FDA’s thoroughly unqualified leader Vinay Prasad reversed course and will now review Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine. I wonder what pushback got to him; I suspect it wasn’t the public outcry, but the business one.

• Why is Prasad unqualified? Well, for one thing, he’s already facing sexual harassment accusations, and is making us taxpayers pay over $65,000 a year for him to commute from California to DC. And he’s only been on the job for 9 months.

• Oklahoma’s radical Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R) says he will eliminate tenure at most public colleges in his state, a great move for a state widely ranked in the bottom five for education.

• Also in Oklahoma, a man speaking out at Claremore City Council meeting against the construction of a new data center was arrested – not stopped, but fucking arrested – for going a few seconds over his allotted time.

• There’s some real evidence that Putin murdered dissident Alexei Navalny … and it barely made a dent in the news this week.

• The Lemoneads’ Evan Dando is a creep.

• Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) has taken up MTG’s mantle as the most overtly racist member of Congress; he has a challenger this fall in Democrat Jennifer Jenkins, who has a history of calling out Fine’s bigoted language and rhetoric. I knew Fine in college; I thought he was pretentious, but if he held these views back then I didn’t know it.

• Harvard took a $350 million gift from Gerald Chan, the second-largest in the university’s history, and then named their school of public health after his father. Chan had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall is also all over the Epstein files. I’ve seen some comments that mere association with Epstein, especially for scientists (given his interest in patronizing scientific research), shouldn’t be a capital offense; I might be sympathetic to that perspective if any of these assholes owned up to schmoozing with the convicted sex offender before their names appeared.

• At Salon, Andi Zeisler writes that academics who communicated and fraternized with Epstein may not be criminals, but they did so in pursuit of a shared vision of a world where only certain people (men, mostly) were worthy of attaining knowledge and the status that comes with it.

• The same folks who were all about “free speech” and talking about opposing cancel culture have been dead silent as the Trump Administration attempts to quell free speech by demanding that social media platforms reveal the identities of users who criticized ICE. Maybe it wasn’t actually about free speech after all.

• Defector’s Patrick Redford wrote how Eileen Gu will never be the ‘traitor’ that J.D. Vance and other nationalist nitwits are calling her.

• Astronomers might have seen a star in the Andromeda Galaxy become a black hole.

• The delightful folks at Flatout Games have a new Kickstarter up for two smaller games, Forage and Honeypot.

• Two minor scandals in the gaming world from the last two weeks: Dice Tower contributor Sam Healey resigned from the site – claiming God told him to step away or some other non-apology nonsense – after he said that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were to blame for being murdered; and Alderac (AEG) COO Ryan Dancey, who has left a trail of messes and controversies behind him in his three decades in the industry, was forced out by CEO John Zinser after Dancey posted a pro-AI and very anti-designers rant on LinkedIn. Hey, I guess something good did come out of that site!