I posted my first mock draft of 2026 for subscribers to the Athletic this past week. I held a Q&A on Thursday to take your questions on the mock and anything else. I also posted a scouting notebook on Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and some other Phillies & Orioles prospects, as well as a draft scouting notebook on some Arkansas and Mississippi prospects, three of whom are probably going in the first round.
I also sent out another epistle of my free email newsletter. Trying to ramp that up to at least every other week.
I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news, including two clips about the mock. I’ve also been messing around on the restaurant app Beli, if anyone else out there is using it.
A very short links post this week, not sure why. Anyway, and now the links…
- Longreads first: Babies are dying because their parents have been scammed by online misinformation into rejecting the vitamin K shot, possibly thinking it’s a vaccine (which is also stupid, as vaccines are safe). Vitamin K is essential for clotting and this ProPublica story reports on babies who have bled to death because they didn’t get the shot.
- The Guardian’s Adrienne Mantel describes how Christian nationalists are destroying our public health infrastructure, and potentially exporting their toxic, superstitious worldview around the globe.
- Texas Monthly exposes how the Southern Baptist Convention was built by a serial child molester.
- The Wall Street Journal investigates betting markets, and, shocker, most bettors there lose money.
- Economist Justin Wolfers calculated the cost to each U.S. household of the current, illegal war on Iran will run to thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars.
- Fayetteville, Georgia, residents, noticed their water pressure was low. It turned out that a data center had stolen 30 million gallons of water via two hookups, paying for neither.
- All life on earth emerged from a single common ancestor, about 4 billion years ago. A new study posits that it was about 200 million years before previously thought, while also revealing some new info on what that first prokaryote was like.
- The AI craze has led to “RAMageddon,” an impending shortage of random access memory chips for all kinds of devices that will likely lead to price increases in the second half of this year.
- Trump’s FDA blocked publication of research showing that the COVID vaccines and the shingles vaccine are both safe. There’s no public health benefit here – they’re just pandering to their anti-science base.
- We’ve got anti-vaxxers, anti-seed oil loons, anti-sunscreen charlatans, and now self-styled “sleep experts” are telling parents to ignore the guidelines on preventing SIDS, giving them dangerous advice that is likely to lead to more infants suffocating in their cribs.
- Video shows an ICE agent tasing a man multiple times in Bushwick, NYC, after which the Department of Homeland Security lied and said he wasn’t tased.
- Fiddler Ashley Macisaac is suing Google after its AI search results wrongly tagged him as a sex offender. It’s only for $1.5 million, which I’m sure Google will settle as a rounding error.
- Ravenous is a new worker-owned food journalism outlet founded by five people who had previously worked/published at Eater.
- NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the social media excitement over beans, particularly on “BeanTok.”
- Rock Manor Games – whose owner is a neighbor of mine – has a new Kickstarter up for two games, The Lost Island and Secret Valley.