For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors, and also held a Q&A to take questions about that and really anything else. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook that covered Kyson Witherspoon, Yoeilin Cespedes, and other Boston/Baltimore prospects.
I sent out a new missive of my free email newsletter last Friday.
I’ve continued posting baseball-related videos, mostly about the players I’m going to see live, to Instagram and TikTok. My daughter is now mad that I have more TikTok followers than she does. I told her to talk more about baseball. I’m also posting often on Bluesky.
And now, the links…
- ProPublica exposes how telecom companies in Alaska scam billions of federal taxpayer dollars to provide slow internet access to the state’s residents, including a convicted felon who gets $1 million a year from the FCC.
- Also from ProPublica: Trump directed a $620 million loan to a company his son Donnie Jr. partially owns.
- Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) has been living secretly for a much-reduced rent payment at a house owned by the far-far-right Christian group The Fellowship, which opposes labor rights and pushes wealth as somehow “Christian.” His primary opponent, Danielle Welch, seems to have little chance of unseating him.
- Sports economist JC Bradbury shared this link about a fight between a developer and the owners of the Richmond Fighting Squirrels, whose new stadium deal has, shocker, turned out to be a dud for the community.
- The city of Nashville is promising a big return on its investment in hosting the Super Bowl, but we know that’s an empty claim.
- Ryan Fournier, co-founder of the astroturf group Students for Trump, was arrested on domestic violence charges.
- The New Republic, spoke to Paulina Mangubat, author of that iconic DNC reply tweet calling Stephen Miller an “ugly fuck” – a charge he is not going to be able to escape any time soon – about how Miller’s wife’s choice to dox her has affected her life, and why she’s not sorry for the tweet. It was a reply to Miller falsely labeling Senate candidate James Talarico as “transgender,” because to MAGA, that’s an insult. Meanwhile, the real issue is that Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, approved a plea deal that gave a serial child rapist one day in prison.
- AI is fueling a rise in “home-brewed” lawsuits where plaintiffs use LLMs instead of lawyers, clogging up the court system. Futurism covered this two months ago as well.
- The Commonwealth Prize, a British literary award that includes publication of winning stories in Granta magazine, is embroiled in controversy as one of its winners this year was very likely produced largely with the help of AI. That story, submitted by a writer from Trinidad named Jamir Nazir, was full of turgid prose that has inspired mockery online – but it’s also true that these AI “detectors” aren’t necessarily trained on different styles of prose, such as that from non-native speakers or those from regions where their English dialect varies from British or American English. Meanwhile – and probably not coincidentally – the Afro-Caribbean author Chanel Sutherland is now having to defend her work as not AI-generated after that same AI detection program (mentioned in the Atlantic piece) claimed her Commonwealth Prize-winning story was the product of AI.
- Another person who was penalized for comments about Charlie Kirk after his death has won compensation after a lawsuit. Suzanne Swierc posted on her private Facebook account that his death was a “tragedy” but the killing was “a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed,” after which Ball State fired her. The University settled the suit, which alleged that the school violated her First Amendment rights, arguing that it was cheaper than fighting it.
- Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary is trying to build an enormous data center that would be two and a half times the size of Manhattan in Utah, and people on the left and right are opposing it.
- In Washington state, a sketchy clean-energy storage project to be build on land sacred to the Yakama peoples is actually going to help power new data centers. From this story: “There is no sign the project is needed to provide more power to meet growing local energy demand in Klickitat County.”
- Wilmington mayor John Carney (D), formerly our governor and at-large Congressman, closed the city’s only permitted encampment for homeless people over protests that the city government told these people to move there in the first place. I agree with the protestors – this is cruel, and unnecessary.