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.