For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB rule 4 draft, and ranked the top 20 rookies by potential MLB impact in 2026. I also posted two draft scouting notebooks, one on the loaded Globe Life Field last weekend that featured Roch Cholowsky, and one on potential top 5 pick Grady Emerson and some second-tier college guys.
At AV Club, I reviewed the two-player game The Yellow House and the capture-the-flag game Space Lion.
With the support of the Athletic, I’m now posting some short videos about prospects, the draft, etc. on Instagram and TikTok. You may also see these videos embedded in stories on the Athletic’s site. As always, my main social media outlet for links and commentary is Bluesky.
Next up for me is a new issue of my free email newsletter, plus my February music update.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Lancet excoriated the current Secretary of Health and Human Services in a piece titled Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: 1 year of failure.
- Defector’s Nate Rogers took a profile of Jason Lee and turned it into a meta-piece about publishing the profile, which Lee tried to prevent just because Rogers asked him about Scientology.
- A crypto scammer known as Bitcoin Jesus lobbied Trump and got himself a sweetheart deal where he just had to pay the taxes he owed, neither pleading guilty nor spending a single day in prison.
- A new cohort study found that people who very frequently (‘always’) listen to music have a lower risk of dementia, as do people who also play music. Excuse me while I go practice guitar…
- Mike Piellucci wrote about the Rangers’ disgraceful decision to install a statue of a racist who fought integration in the 1950s and then refuse to answer questions about it. That’s the same team that refuses to host a Pride Night, the only MLB team not to do so, and one of two MLB teams without a paid maternity leave policy. They are who you thought they were.
- Israeli “settlers” – that term is such a gross euphemism – harassed a Palestinian family for two years until the family left its home so these so-called settlers could take it over. There are words for people who take over territory through the use of violence, and “settler” ain’t one of them.
- New York Times opinion writer Jeneen Interlandi went long on the human cost of Trump’s attempt to destroy scientific research at American universities.
- The U.S. missile attack on a military base that flattened a girls’ school was bad enough, but we hit the school a second time to kill some of the survivors.
- A story in Quanta asks if Georg Cantor plagiarized or at least failed to credit Richard Dedekind for large parts of his 1874 letter on the different sizes of infinities and the existence of transcendental numbers. I find it odd that the story never mentions the name of Cantor’s paper, “On a Property of the Collection of All Real Algebraic Numbers,” which demonstrated that the set of algebraic numbers is countable. (Thanks to reader Shaun P. for sending this along.)
- Proton Mail pitches itself as the pro-privacy email option, but they narced on one of their customers to the FBI.
- The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch explains how ICE intends to cram thousands of people into warehouses, with little regard for what might happen with that many humans in one space.
- An ICE hostage held at concentration camp in Florence, Arizona, died of an untreated tooth infection. And there’s a raging measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas.
- Meanwhile, Customs and Border Patrol dumped a nearly-blind man who didn’t speak English on the streets of Buffalo, where he was found dead outside a Tim Horton’s several days later. The agents didn’t take him home, and put him out without shoes.
- The great Brett Anderson wrote about the rise of the all-day café in the New York Times.
- Also in the Times, musician/poet Richard Hell, a founding member of Television and the singer/songwriter of “Blank Generation” with his own band, showed off the rent-stabilized apartment where he’s lived for half a century.
- Mississippi consistently ranks as one of the worst states in education, so of course their state House passed a bill to make college athletes’ NIL money tax-free.
- The University of Mississippi fired an executive assistant who reposted a comment on the legacy of Charlie Kirk after his murder; faculty members in Oxford have testified that the firing “chilled free speech” on campus. She’s suing the school, saying her First Amendment rights were violated.
- New Hampshire House Republicans passed a bill to ban “leftist indoctrination” and LGBTQ+ topics in public schools, yet another assault on free speech from the ‘free speech’ party.
- A pro-Trump, pro-MAGA account on Twitter that boasted 300,000 followers is actually run by a White House staffer.
- Purdue University rescinded ‘dozens’ of offers to graduate student applicants from China, complying in advance with a threat from House Republicans.
- The executive branch is lying about the people ICE arrests, putting up photos and calling them “WORST OF WORST” even when they have no criminal records.
- The Tampa Bay Times was once a legitimate newspaper, but they’re now running AI-generated stories.
- The Texas lawyer who helped write Texas’ draconian abortion ban found a client for a lawsuit against a California doctor who prescribed abortion pills to the client’s ex-girlfriend. These zealots will stop at nothing.
- For example, a woman who went to a Tennessee hospital for a sterilization procedure was admitted, given an IV, and then told that the hospital wouldn’t do the procedure because the hospital’s Catholic Ethics Oversight Committee said they had “a duty to protect her sacred fertility.” Sounds like they set her up to waste her time, just like those pregnancy ‘crisis’ centers do.
- Measles is everywhere – there are over 100 hospitalizations from measles in Utah, it’s in Georgia now, and the U.S. is on pace to see triple the number of cases it saw in 2025.
- The police chief of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, is on leave and facing (merited) calls for his resignation after the violent arrest of five students protesting ICE at their school in Bucks County.
- Syria’s post-Assad government has been consolidating control over the fractured country, and even offered citizenship to the Kurdish people and made Kurdish an official language. The Kurds are the largest stateless population in the world, with about 10% of them living within Syria.
- Longtime essayist and blogger Michele Catalano re-shared her 2025 post about how gambling wrecked her family in the wake of the various infuriating news items about people betting on the Iran war and the use of nuclear weapons.
- Backdoor 43 in Milan claims it’s the smallest bar in the world.
- One new Kickstarter this week, for Kaelora, a set collection game from Tangerine Games.
I live just a few miles away from Quakertown. I’m afraid that nothing will happen to that police chief. The videos I saw of the incident are chaotic enough that it’s hard to tell exactly what started everything, what happened when, etc. The guy’s actions were clearly reprehensible, he was not in uniform as he’s supposed to be, and of course he’s a complete MAGAt, but I have no faith in these types of people being held accountable any longer.
Also, after reading over this article, I’m reminded of why I had to stop reading them. Everything sucks. Guess I’ll go listen to some music.
I want the kid to do well, but I do not see #1 high school prospect when I see Emerson. I can’t provide another name for you because I don’t have that much knowledge on the class, but I’ll say this: I’ve watched him probably 20 times in the last 4 years, and there are 2 or 3 kids in that district (meaning his old one, before he quit on Argyle) I’d feel more anxious about facing in a close game than Emerson. He left a good program to go pad stats at a terrible private school. He has a fantastic eye. I have never watched him hit and gone “holy shit that kid is good.”
He switched schools to play under Rusty Greer, who’s the head coach at Emerson’s new school. Not saying I agree with it, but it’s not about padding stats. Nobody cares about that kind of stats for a HS player.
He was one of the best hitters on the showcase circuit last summer against the best stuff most of these guys will ever see before the draft. That’s what’s driving it. I agree with you that he doesn’t look like the typical #1 HS prospect – he’s not tooled out or explosive or anything like that. You’re hoping for McGonigle, or Wetherholt but at age 18.
Keith, while I agree with the general point about making NIL tax free, your view of Mississippi education is somewhat behind the crimes. While historically they did have among the worst educational ratings and results, they deserve credit for massive improvements in the past 10-15 years, having moved from typically ranking in the broom 2-3 states in standard metrics to being in the top 10-15 in several of the standard metrics used to measure public school systems, despite still spending well less than several blue states like New York and California. In the eduction world, this is sometimes referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle” and is a dramatic example of what can be accomplished with a well thought out plan, appropriate support, and some resources.
The Mississippi “Miracle” came about in part because they juked the stats: They stopped promoting third-graders who didn’t meeting reading standards and held them back a year, thus artificially inflating their reading results for fourth-graders. And chronic underfunding means there are still huge disparities by race: “Only four out of the 43 school districts with A ratings by the Mississippi Department of Education have a majority Black student population, while all 11 D- and F-rated school districts have a majority-Black student population.”
Any doctor who doesn’t want to do a medical procedure because of their “religious beliefs” should be immediately transferred to do medic work in war zones. If they’re so holy, let them prove it rather than waste the time of patients with valid concerns. And any hospital that does this should be forced to make all their prejudices clear at the fucking front door.
Stokes lawyer in that University of Mississippi case is impressive. The article was extreme well-written and detailed. Bravo!