For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my Big Board for this year’s draft, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, and then held a Q&A on Thursday. I also posted a minor league scouting notebook last weekend, covering Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and others.
I filed two more pieces this morning, so next up will be a new issue of my free email newsletter, followed by a game review to run here.
And now, the links…
- Texas Republicans repeatedly failed to pass flood protection legislation that would have prevented the deadly floods that killed 139 people last summer, according to a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation.
- Louisiana is one of a handful of reactionary states asking a federal judge to strike a 1973 law protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. Yep – Republicans want to be able to discriminate against Americans who use wheelchairs, or have visual or hearing impairments, and so on. This should be a major campaign issue for Democrats, given how many of us know and care about someone with a disability.
- The Wall Street Journal (subscription definitely required here) writes about Sweden’s shift away from its extensive social welfare system, reducing government spending but also raising fears of inequality and increased poverty in the future.
- Tennessee continues to show its ass to the world. Keith Ervin, a school board member in Washington County, Tennessee, said to a teenaged girl speaking before the board, “God, you’re hot,” and put his arm around her. The board declined to remove him, and she blasted them in speech before the board last week, saying “you are all cowards.” Which they are.
- Also in Tennessee, Rep. Andy Ogles, who raised $25,000 in a fundraiser for a children’s memorial he never built, is now claiming that never happened.
- Watertown, Wisconsin’s school board voted to ban an instrumental song from the district’s spring concert merely because it was dedicated LGBT rights pioneer Marsha P. Johnson. And now the cowards won’t answer questions about it. They should get zero peace for this. The next board meeting is Monday, May 18th, so if you live nearby, go let them know how you feel.
- Slate’s Maggie Hennessy writes about how the rise of food ‘influencers’ posting pseudo-reviews on TikTok etc. are costing us the real benefits of proper food criticism.
- Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone writes about how his organization fought the Trump administration and won.
- Jess Valenti writes on her Substack about a case where Child Protective Services kidnapped a 14-year-old girl from her mother’s care because she might have gotten an abortion. There are very few specifics in the story, for the privacy of the mother and teen, but I also want to acknowledge that this story is impossible to verify.
- 404 Media’s Jason Koebler writes that other so-called writers’ AI use is breaking his brain.
- Nearly 50,000 people living near Lake Tahoe are about to lose their power because of fucking data centers. Not temporarily, either, as the electricity generator is redirecting its output to uses that are not people.
- Human Rights Watch issued a new report on the massacres, mass rapes, and abductions taking place in the Congolese city of Uvira since the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23 seized the city in December.
- Another Kennedy failson is running for Congress, and as The New York Times reports, Jack Schlossberg’s campaign is a mess – but he’s still in line to win.
- Restoration Games has a video trailer up for their upcoming Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit game, a new implementation of the 2000 game Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit.
- The crowdfunding effort for the game Vanea: Guardians of the Eldertree has been relaunched and is already funded.
- Bloomsbury Publishing is shutting down Osprey Games, which has published Cryptid, the Undaunted Series, The King is Dead, and more acclaimed titles. They’ll continue to publish wargames and RPGs under the Osprey name.