Stick to baseball, 7/11/26.

Happy Draft Day! I posted my final mock draft on Friday and held a Q&A to answer your questions about it, after posting one on Monday and holding a Q&A that afternoon. I posted my final Big Board of the top 100 prospects in the draft class, ss well as some scouting reports on prospects beyond the top 100 who will probably still be drafted. I also previewed the Futures Game rosters, and posted a scouting notebook on Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, and Mets prospects.

I appeared on KIRO-Seattle to talk Mariners prospects and the trade deadline, and on The Score Chicago to talk about the draft and some big-picture baseball questions.

I’ll send another issue of my free email newsletter once I clear the draft stuff. You can also find me on Bluesky – I’m only posting links on X at this point, not replying to anything and not allowing new followers – and I continue to be more active on Instagram and TikTok.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This Vulture story by Irin Carmon on Today’s handling of the Nancy Guthrie story, including the environment behind the scenes and the difficult questions the show has had to face, is absolutely fantastic. I can’t even do it justice in a sentence or two here.

• America is entering a postliterate age, as succeeding generations read less and comprehend less of what they read, writes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. Those of us who do still read account for an increasing share of books purchased in what Horowitch refers to as a “niche hobby.”

• America is self-destructing, writes Stephen Marche in The Guardian, arguing that this was written in our founding. I loved the line “Donald Trump is the ultimate nostalgia act.”

• RFK Jr.’s vaccine-denial organization Children’s Health Defense helped Andrea Shaw file a lawsuit claiming that her twins died from being vaccinated, but she’s now been arrested on charges that she murdered them. That’s right: Children’s Health Defense is supporting a child murderer. Here’s a local story on the case.

• The University of Tennessee will pay $1.9 million to a professor the school fired over her comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. Good for her. I hope the taxpayers of Tennessee think this was worth it!

• In Springfield, Ohio, the subject of Republican lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, a Haitian man was shot in the head while taking his children to church.

• Florida is the new Texas: Gov. Ron DeSantis is killing prisoners at an unprecedented rate, signing death warrants and leading to the state’s highest execution levels ever. Two of every five U.S. prisoners put to death were killed by Florida.

• A professor at Brown University made his midterm exams take-home, and believed that nearly all of his students cheated by using AI, so he switched the final exam to in-class and everyone’s grades plummeted.

• A day before Trump announced his first tariff ‘pause’, he made 327 stock trades that he didn’t disclose until this past week, almost 15 months later. Prior to 2016, this would have been immediate grounds for impeachment.

• Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), who is running for the Senate seat held by Jon Ossoff, spent $400,000 in taxpayer money to make campaign ads, which is illegal. That’s in Judd Legum’s Popular.info newsletter; I see zero mainstream coverage of what sure seems like misuse of taxpayer funds.

• A New York resident sent an email to the head of ICE. DHS agents tracked him down and threatened him. He’s suing with the help of FIRE, arguing that his First Amendment rights have been violated.

• And Florida International University is also ignoring the First Amendment, threatening to withhold the diplomas of students who silently protested ICE’s presence on campus unless those students apologize on video.

• Sticking with Florida, a cop there became obsessed with a woman he met on a TV shoot and used license-plate readers to stalk her around the state, nearly causing a head-on collision as he raced to accost her.

• In The American Prospect, David Dayen writes that Maine Democrats should hold a “lighthouse primary” – essentially a caucus – to pick a new candidate whenever Graham Platner gives up the ghost.

• Elie Mystal writes in The Nation how SCOTUS’ anti-trans ruling isn’t just about sports, but denying that trans people are entitled to equal rights.

• The U.S. District Court judges of the Western Washington District wrote an editorial about how tyranny threatens an independent judiciary, whether it’s threats of violence against jurists on the bench or claims that someone is above the law entirely.

• How the love affair between the Algerian national team and the people of Lawrence, Kansas, became one of the best stories of this year’s World Cup – that is, before the refs and the President ruined everything.

• I’ve seen very little news coverage of the civil war in Sudan – maybe because we’re busy starting wars or prolonging those of other countries – but there’s a massive humanitarian crisis about to happen in the Sudanese city of El Obeid, with the potential for another massacre by the RSF militia.

• There’s an outbreak of the Marburg virus, a filovirus that causes hemorrhagic fevers like the Ebola virus does, in Uganda.

• This NPR piece on creative ways to use up leftovers (and stop wasting food) was both validating – fried rice is a go-to for us – and inspiring.

• Also in The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber examines Lizzo’s latest album flopping and how easy it’s become to fall into the “Khia Asylum.” I liked Lizzo’s 2022 album Special, and didn’t even realize she’d released a new one, Bitch, until I saw this story.

• Scientists have found evidence of a new chemical compound on Pluto and Titan. I propose they call it “unobtainium.”

• Another week, another story of AI hallucinations: A ProPublica reporter found an AI-generated website for a shell company that fooled Google’s AI overviews into thinking the company was real.

• Egypt and Turkey turned away a cruise ship for LGBTQ+ folks on ‘morality’ grounds. Which makes them just like Texas!

• So many Kickstarters for interesting board games: Ringyo, the latest game from the publishers of Distilled and Luthier. It’s a simultaneous worker-placement game and is in beta on Board Game Arena.

• A three-in-one from Allplay that includes Kabuto Sumo Dice, IMPS, and Wild Berries.

• The Isle of Penguins, the latest game from the designer/publisher of The Isle of Cats and its various spinoffs.
  
• Galileo’s Truth, from two of the designers of Egizia (one of the best complex games ever), Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Coimbra.