Four new posts this week at the Athletic: How the White Sox helped Jacob Gonzalez get his groove back, my redraft of the 2016 draft class, my look at all of the first-round misses from that year (and there were so, so many), and a story on Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd’s efforts to help Ugandan kids and his collaboration with Connect Roasters on a new coffee release. (Full disclosure: Connect sent me a bag of Hope Blend, and has sent me other coffees to try in the past as well.)
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- Longreads first: All this talk about putting some kind of colony on Mars ignores the reality that it’s an unbelievably hostile environment for life, writes Henry Wismayer in the Berggruen Institute’s magazine, No?ma.
- The Atlantic discovered that popular AI song-generating agents were trained on millions of stolen copyrighted tracks. Make ‘em pay.
- The kleptocracy in Washington knows no bounds: Markwayne Mullin, now head of Homeland Security, has fought any regulation or warnings about the dangers of kratom, because he’s invested $1 million in a kratom company. Kratom has two psychoactive compounds and can cause liver toxicity, but because it’s a “supplement” it’s basically unregulated.
- Also in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer points out that the war on the abortion pill shows that the whole “leave abortion up to the states” story was just another lie.
- Trump and his cronies debated ending the Constitutional right of habeus corpus for people arrested as potentially undocumented immigrants.
- One common claim from creationists and other evolution deniers is that humans are some sort of end point in the process of evolution. This is disproven by copious evidence that humans are still evolving.
- The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that moves heat around the Atlantic ocean, may be heading towards collapse due to anthropogenic climate change. The UK and EU are threatening to cut funding that helps monitor it.
- A cop responding to a shoplifting incident shot into a car and killed a one-year-old boy, even though the officer knew the child was in the vehicle. I am struggling to understand why any shoplifting claim would provoke the use of a firearm. The officer has since been placed on administrative leave, but we all know that’s a temporary and often worthless response.
- The high school group that had sued to block Idaho’s anti-trans bathroom bill dropped its case after one of the students involved took their own life. A few days later, a federal judge blocked the law. These bills/laws do absolutely nothing except put targets on trans people. There is zero evidence that they’re addressing an actual problem in child safety.
- Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), a Trump toady and election denier, pointed a gun at his ex-wife and threw scalding water at her, according to police audio. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, and she has accused Miller of physical abuse, while he’s responded by calling her crazy. He’s opposed this year by union ironworker Brian Poindexter.
- Oklahoma regulators approved a new mine that will threaten a fragile aquifer, because in Oklahoma, profits are more important than clean water!
- The Frontier obtained contracts various Oklahoma cities and towns signed with data centers, often with NDAs that prevent officials there from even acknowledging the deals’ existence.
- Texas’ state Board of Education is going to vote on whether to teach second graders the story of the “Black Robe Regiment” Christians who did not actually help lead the American Revolution. It’s just not true.
- The University of Texas used specious logic to block a fund-raising festival for the public-radio station KUT, then fired the station manager when she put the lie to their claims.
- The son of Sen. Kristin Gillenbrand (D-NY) just graduated from college and then landed $30 million in investment in his crypto-derivatives startup. I’m sure there’s no connection.